Trump Tweet Time: An 8-bit “Executive Time” Game

A silly game to guess the activity on Trump’s schedule while he was tweeting.
R
rtweet
Shiny
Apps
Author

Garrick Aden-Buie

Published

February 9, 2019

Trump’s Excutive Time

Last week, Donald Trump’s White House schedule was leaked and published online by Axios. One highlight from the released documents is the large amount of unstructured “Executive Time” that appears on his schedule.

The #rstats Twitter community immediately began to wonder what interesting anaylses could be done in comparing Trump’s schedule to the tweets he sent out.

Axios helpfully released a Google Spreadsheet to accompany the PDF version of the schedule, and a curated version has also been posted on Data World. Jonathan Sidi also built a cool Shiny app for viewing Trumps tweets on a time line over his schedule.

I started to pull together an analysis for an upcoming blog post, and here’s a little sneak peak.

An 8-bit Distraction

But then I got distracted. Colin Fay recently released a port of ness-css for Shiny called nessy, and it looks awesome. I just needed a good reason to create an awesome 8-bit retro Shiny app.

The idea came to me during the analysis. Can you tell what Trump is doing (or is supposed to be doing) by the tweets he sends? Why not put your intuition to the test?

Trump Tweet Time

So I built a simple Shiny game called Trump Tweet Time that you can play right now. An 8-bit Trump shouts a tweet at you and you have to guess what was on his schedule while he was tweeting.

A screenshot of a SuperNES-styled Donald Trump with a speach bubble containing a random tweet. Three buttons offer the options for “meeting”, “travel” or “executive time”

A screenshot of a SuperNES-styled Donald Trump with a speach bubble containing a random tweet. Three buttons offer the options for “meeting”, “travel” or “executive time”

A screenshot after the user has clicked “executive time” revealing that Trump tweeted during Executive Time.

A screenshot after the user has clicked “executive time” revealing that Trump tweeted during Executive Time.

Thanks to Colin Fay for nessy and Mike Kearney for rtweet! Your packages made this fun and easy.

Now go enjoy some executive time!