Trump Sets One-Day Personal Record with a Staggering 200 Twitter Posts Amid Economic, Public Health, and Racial Justice Crises

Reed RichardsonJun 6th, 2020, 1:20 am
 
Donald Trump Tweets

Photo credit: Nicholas Kamm / AFP /Getty Images – with Twitter logo

Once every seven minutes and 12 seconds.

That would be the average time between Twitter posts if President Donald Trump had evenly spaced out the 200 tweets, retweets, and quote tweets he unleashed during the 24 hours of Friday, June 5. Trump broke his all-time record on a day when the country was simultaneously wracked by a global pandemic, nationwide unrest over police killings of African-Americans, and an economy where the second-highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression was treated as good news.

According to the online tracking date site Factbase, Trump easily blew past his old record of 142 total Twitter posts from January 22 of this year, the second day of his Senate impeachment trial. His 37 originally authored tweets on Friday, however, only rose to second place all-time, five shy of his previous record of 42 which was set…the day before. He also set records for most tweets in one week — 468 — and most tweets in a single hour — 79.

During the president’s prolific day online, he began with a quote tweet of his own re-election campaign’s account celebrating the return of an American hostage from Iran, posted at 1:21 a.m. From that point, the president went on a retweeting rampage, at times reposting a dozen or more tweets from various Senate Republicans, many of whom appeared on Fox News. A little before 8:00 a.m., Trump complimented Idaho Governor Brad Little for advancing to stage three of reopening the state from the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump’s insight to the milestone?: “Great going Brad!” Minutes later, Trump struck a similar note: “Great going Mike!” about Sen. Mike Crapo’s (R-ID) Medicare Advantage bill. At 8:30 a.m., he posted a series of self-congratulatory tweets about the May jobs report which found the national unemployment rate to be 13.3%: “Great going President Trump (kidding but true)!” In late morning, Trump tweeted out a Rasmussen Reports poll that claimed he had 40% job approval among black likely voters (a Marist poll from Friday pegged his approval among African-American adults at 12%). After lunch, he found time to slam Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser as “incompetent” not long after she allowed “Black Lives Matter” to be painted in huge letters on 16th Street just a block from the White House. Two hours later, he called himself a “big fan” of NFL QB Drew Brees, but then criticized the player for reversing course on national anthem protests before proclaiming “NO KNEELING!” In the early evening, a clearly piqued Trump again attacked Bowser, this time upping the insult ante to “grossly incompetent.” Just before 10:00 p.m., he retweeted a two-day old video of a right-wing pundit dismissing George Floyd as “no hero” and saying that the idea “[Floyd] has been held up as a martyr sickens me.” Minutes later, Trump shared a doctored video about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden that Politifact has confirmed is false. Trump’s final post in this Friday Twitter deluge involved plugging a book by a black campaign supporter, who has come under ethics scrutiny for running a non-profit that holds dubious “cash giveaways” in African-American communities all while touting Trump to the hopeful attendees.

Just another day’s work for this president.

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