It’s so quaint that politicians still get pissed at the press and utter some version of Mark Twain’s, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”

That was underscored again Monday by Donald Trump, who tweeted, “If the press would cover me accurately and honorably, I would have far less reason to ‘tweet.’ Sadly, I don’t know if that will ever happen!”

This is no longer about ink. It’s all about tweets in Trump’s unceasing, politically pleasing campaign against the media.

People chatter about the impossibility of Trump continuing to tweet after he becomes the most powerful person on the planet. Surely, the Secret Service will tell him to cease and desist, right?

John Feehery, a Republican consultant who was a bigshot aide for top congressional Republicans, says, “He tweets, therefore he is. Twitter gives him a platform to say whatever he wants completely unfiltered. The media can’t and won’t do that for him.”

Trump is the exemplar of a new maxim, disclosed here for the first time: If you can’t take the heat, sit down and tweet. It’s weak and sad. But it’s also the new reality.

Richard Parker of Harvard’s Kennedy School, says, “With apologies to Mark Twain: Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were president-elect; but I repeat myself.”

Then there’s Dennis Culloton, a Chicago corporate and political consultant who was once spokesman for a Republican Illinois governor.

“Like it or not, with nearly 17 million followers on Twitter, President-elect Trump has a bigger audience than the mainstream media he assails. Never pick a fight with someone who buys tweets by the barrel.”

Fast action in Pittsburgh

Some polling folks contacted me about curious election numbers in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, seemingly doubling (in some instances) Trump’s official numbers as provided by local election officials.

For example, on the paper’s website, in the town of Carnegie Trump topped Clinton by 3,148 to 1,944. Using the official Allegheny County website, it shows Clinton winning by 1,959 to 1,886. Similarly, in Castle Shannon, the paper says Trump won 3,646 to 2,292 But Allegheny has Clinton winning 2,303 to 1,828. There are other examples and, in Allegheny County as a whole, the paper nearly doubled Trump’s number.

David Shribman, the paper’s esteemed Pulitzer Prize winning editor, says those numbers will now come down until it can figure out what happened. “This is a huge mystery to us, too.”

Lillian Thomas, the news editor who supervised election coverage, said she was mortified over the mistakes. She said the paper will quickly get to the bottom of why its Trump numbers were jacked up in Allegheny but not those of other candidates.

Tweet of the night

As the Indianapolis Colts were humiliating the home New York Jets on Monday Night Football, Wall Street Journal sports reporter Jason Gay declared, “I think the cast of New York Jets should apologize to Mike Pence tonight.” (@jasongay)

Nice digital news at The Times

The New York Times has added 200,000 digital-only subscribers during the fourth quarter, helped along by an election bump and Trump’s recurring antagonism. (Poynter)

That is impressive, and especially so if those subscribers stick. It also noted that 13 percent of subscribers are now international. (Nieman Lab)

The Outline, more than outlined

Joshua Topolsky, a former Bloomberg and Verge editor, debuted The Outline as he aims “to establish a next-generation version of The New Yorker while also fixing many of the ills facing digital publishing and advertising.” (The Wall Street Journal)