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Meet Pierre Delecto, aka Mitt Romney.
The Utah senator and former Republican presidential candidate has revealed that he’s been tweeting under a shadow account to anonymously defend himself and monitor the political conversation since 2011.
“What do they call me, a lurker?” he told McKay Coppins in a new Atlantic profile. But he was coy. “I won’t give you the name of it … I’m following 668 people.”
Yet Slate soon began speculating that Twitter user @qaws9876, under the name Pierre Delecto, could be Romney’s secret social media feed. Reporter Ashley Feinberg noticed that Romney’s oldest son Tagg was Pierre Delecto’s first follower. And Pierre Delecto was also following all of Romney’s children, as well as several of his former advisers.
Related: Romney says he’s open to removing Trump from office, if the evidence is there
So Atlantic writer Coppins called Romney back to ask whether he was indeed Pierre Delecto, and shared the response on Twitter. “Just spoke to @MittRomney on the phone, and asked him about Pierre Delecto,” Coppins tweeted. “His only response: ‘C’est moi.’”
The name translates into English as “Peter Delight” or “Delightful Peter.” And the account, which has no profile pic, follows 702 users and has 1,173 followers, soon went private. Before it went dark, however, Slate and some other users snagged screenshots of Pierre’s tweets and the tweets he liked. As a true lurker, Romney only tweeted 10 times as Pierre Delecto, which were all replies to other tweets. One seemed to criticize Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria, but said the Senate was powerless to do anything: “agree on Trump’s awful decision, but what could the Senate do to stop it?”
Of course, plenty of public figures have hidden behind online aliases. Former FBI director James Comey revealed in 2017 that he had been behind the @FormerBu Twitter account (username Reinhold Niebuhr) before going public and changing his handle to @Comey.
“Friends” star Jennifer Aniston made a record-breaking Instagram debut last week — but she admitted on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” that she had what she called a “stalker account,” aka a finsta (fake Instagram) account, to “dip my toe into the sort of social media pool.”
And among the most infamous was former NYC Congressman and mayor candidate Anthony Weiner, who withdrew from the 2013 mayoral race after it was revealed he was sexting women under the alias “Carlos Danger.”
But naturally, many on Twitter found Romney’s secret account … delectable.
