Twitter use by Donald Trump
's use of social media attracted worldwide attention since he joined Twitter in March 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his first presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his first term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers.
For most of Trump's first term, his account on Twitter, where he often posted controversial and false statements, remained unmoderated in the name of "public interest". Congress performed its own form of moderation: in July 2019, the House of Representatives voted mostly along party lines to censure him for "racist comments" he had tweeted. Following the censure, his tweets only accelerated. An investigation by The New York Times published in November 2019, found that, during his time in office to date, Trump had retweeted numerous conspiracy theories or fringe content.
During his 2020 reelection campaign, he falsely suggested that postal voting or electoral fraud may compromise the election, prompting Twitter to either remove such tweets or label them as disputed. After his election loss, Trump persistently undermined the election results in the weeks leading to Joe Biden's inauguration. His tweets played a role in inciting the January 2021, attack of the US Capitol during the formal counting of electoral votes. Though the Senate eventually acquitted Trump during his second impeachment, Twitter permanently suspended his @realDonaldTrump handle, followed by the official account of his campaign and the accounts of allies who posted on his behalf, such as the Trump campaign digital director. Twitter also deleted three tweets by Trump on the @POTUS handle and barred access to the presidential account until Joe Biden's inauguration.
In November 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, and the first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account remained inactive until he tweeted again in August 2024.
Background
From his official declaration of candidacy in 2015, Donald Trump benefited from large numbers of supporters active on social media. Some supporters called themselves "Centipedes" online.As president, Trump preferred to communicate over social media, announcing policy changes and the dismissals of staff members there. Trump largely bypassed the White House Press Secretary, and his administration ended the daily White House press briefing. Trump preferred "to dictate and dominate the news cycle"; his communications emphasized his political grievances, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked those he regarded as enemies.
Trump used the retweet feature on Twitter to forward messages he agreed with, no matter how obscure their authors were. At times, Trump retweeted himself, and sometimes commented "so true" while doing so.
An investigation by The New York Times published in November 2019, found that, during his time in office to date, Trump had already retweeted at least 145 accounts that "have pushed conspiracy or fringe content, including more than two dozen that have since been suspended."
As Trump continued to issue brief statements, his spokesperson Liz Harrington tweeted screenshots of them under the Save America logo from June 2021 to June 2022. Since then, however, her Twitter handle @realLizUSA has been infrequently used. In April 2023, at his arraignment hearing, Trump was warned by Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan not to use social media to incite violence.
Followers
By the time Twitter suspended Trump's Twitter account in January 2021 as a consequence of the 2021 United States Capitol attack, @realDonaldTrump had been followed by 88.7 million users.When Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, he had 2.98 million followers; his follower count thereafter increased rapidly. Many of his followers, however, were fake accounts and Twitter bots: a May 2017 analysis concluded that, of the then-30.9 million followers of Trump's personal Twitter account, 51 percent were real and 49 percent were fake. In mid-2018, Twitter conducted a site-wide crackdown on fake accounts, reducing the total number of users of the site by about 6 percent; as a result, Trump lost about 100,000 of his then-53.4 million followers. Trump repeatedly complained about reductions in the number of followers, claiming that Twitter was biased against him, and raised his complaints in tweets and in a private meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. In October 2018, the research group SparkToro estimated that more than 6 percent of Trump's followers were "bots, spam, inactive or propaganda"—a significantly higher percentage than for followers of other American politician Twitter accounts.
Public opinion
Trump's advisors warned him that his tweets may alienate some of his supporters. In a June 2017 Fox News poll, 70 percent of respondents said Trump's tweets hurt his agenda. In a January 2019 UMass Lowell poll, 68 percent of all respondents aged 18–37 said Trump tweeted too much.Rate of tweets
In November 2016, shortly after winning the election, Trump said in a 60 Minutes interview that, as president, his use of social media would be "very restrained, if I use it at all." Trump went on to Tweet more than 25,000 times during his presidency; by the first half of 2019, he was tweeting as frequently as he had as a candidate, and he doubled this rate during the second half of 2019 and the first half of 2020. On his most prolific day, June 5, 2020, he tweeted 200 times.Tweets counted through Trump Twitter Archive are shown below.
| Date range | Tweets | Daily average |
| 2009 | 56 | 0.2 |
| 2010 | 142 | 0.4 |
| 2011 | 774 | 2.1 |
| 2012 | 3,531 | 9.6 |
| 2013 | 8,138 | 22.3 |
| 2014 | 5,773 | 15.8 |
| 2015, pre-candidacy | 3,701 | 22.3 |
| Candidacy | 7,794 | 15.2 |
| Transition | 364 | 5.1 |
| Presidency, Year 1, first half | 1,027 | 5.7 |
| Presidency, Year 1, second half | 1,576 | 8.6 |
| Presidency, Year 2, first half | 1,472 | 8.1 |
| Presidency, Year 2, second half | 2,146 | 11.7 |
| Presidency, Year 3, first half | 2,814 | 15.6 |
| Presidency, Year 3, second half | 5,151 | 28.1 |
| Presidency, Year 4, first half | 6,014 | 33.2 |
| Presidency, Year 4, second half, until account suspension | 5,993 | 34.8 |
| Candidacy, from account reinstatement | 27 | 0 |
In addition to the tweets he put out, he was also the intended recipient of tweets by others. In 2019, Donald Trump was tagged on Twitter at a rate of 1,000 times per minute, according to ''The New York Times.''
Device security
After Trump's first inauguration, the White House would not comment on whether he was using a secure phone.Before, he had been using a Samsung Galaxy S3 which only had Android 4.3.1 as its latest OS, a version of Android which Google marked as unsupported and discontinued as of Trump's inauguration. Since then, he has used an iPhone to use Twitter.
The iPhone Twitter app used by Trump in 2018 lacked certain security features, and Politico reported in May 2018 that Trump's phone "has gone as long as five months" without being checked by security experts.
On October 24, 2018, The New York Times reported that Trump was still using his personal iPhones for phone calls, even though his aides and US intelligence officials have warned him that Russian and Chinese spies are listening. Trump responded by tweeting: "I only use Government Phones." The tweet was sent from an iPhone.
Trump's @realDonaldTrump Twitter account was breached twice by Dutch hacker Victor Gevers, both times by guessing weak passwords. The first incident took place in 2016, using the guessed password "yourefired". The password was guessed because it had previously been discovered in a 2012 LinkedIn password breach. The second incident took place in October 2020, when his account was breached by guessing the password "maga2020!". Although reports of the second attack were denied by Twitter and the White House, they were later confirmed by Dutch prosecutors in December 2020.
As official statements
Throughout his presidency, Trump frequently appeared to issue orders through his tweets. Whether these tweets were official directives was unclear. A US National Archives spokesman said that Trump's tweets are considered presidential records.In 2017, the Department of Justice argued in one court case that Trump's tweets were "official statements of the President of the United States". In another case, the DOJ argued they were official policy statements but that the tweets were also "personal conduct that is not an exercise of state power". The ABA Journal wrote in 2017, "There's little caselaw on to what extent government use of social media can be considered official or a 'public forum,' which affords First Amendment protection to people who might be excluded based on their viewpoints."
In 2019, the Secretary of the US Navy said he did not interpret a Trump tweet as a "formal order to act" after Trump tweeted that the Navy should not take away Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher's status as a Navy SEAL.
In 2020, a court asked that Trump clarify his intention after he tweeted what appeared to be an order calling for the disclosure of documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a court filing, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said that: "The President indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were not self-executing declassification orders and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents."