WAKE UP AND SMELL THE ‘COVFEFE’: DONALD TRUMP’S YEAR IN TWEETS
US president Donald Trump published more than 1,350 tweets this year.
He uses Twitter to break news, share his views, conduct feuds with his critics, and even fellow world leaders. He rarely holds back, but history will no doubt come to view it as a contemporaneous, and very personal, record of his thoughts on a given subject or person, or both.
In a tweet addressed to “haters and fools”, Mr Trump declared: “Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing.”
Whether he feels the same after special counsel Robert Mueller and his team have completed their investigations remains to be seen.
On November 8, Mr Trump marked the anniversary of his election win over Hillary Clinton with a congratulatory message “to all of the deplorables” – a reference to her nickname for his political supporters.
Although the judiciary is strictly independent of the legislative and executive branches of government, Mr Trump has made the highly unusual decision to weigh in with opinions on various trials, such as the case of the lorry driver who drove down a cycle path in Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring 12.
On two consecutive days in November, the president tweeted that the accused man, Sayfullo Saipov, deserved the death penalty. At the time, Sayfullo’s trial had not begun.
In September, he called for National Football League players to be sacked or suspended if they knelt during the national anthem, and urged fans to “refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our flag and country”.
One of the most intriguing tweets was the one in which the president included the word “Covfefe”. The word was later added to the urban dictionary but its meaning remains a mystery.
It left many of his 31 million followers on Twitter baffled and slightly concerned.