Twitter ye not, Donald’s at it again!

As we are all aware, President Trump devotes a great deal of time to tweeting. since embarking on this dubious hobby in 2009, he has issued a staggering 36,260 tweets, and the number continues to increase daily: in the 24 hours up to yesterday lunchtime, he had already issued 20 tweets.

He is so proud of his tweets that he once tweeted his pride in them. ‘Many are saying I’m the best 140 character writer in the world,’ he tweeted on November 10, 2012.

Various words and phrases recur in his tweets. Take the word ‘loser’, for instance. so far, he has called people ‘loser’ in 234 different tweets, among them Cher, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (‘ a real loser!’), Jeb Bush, Rosie O’Donnell (‘ a total loser!’), Marco Rubio and our very own Lord sugar, (‘the worst kind of loser’).

sometimes he targets losers en masse. ‘ sorry losers and haters,’ he tweeted on May 8 2013, ‘but my I.Q. is one of the highest — and you all know it. Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.’

‘Goofy’ and ‘Clown’ are two of his other favourite terms of abuse. Arianna Huffington is a ‘ clown’, and so is the TV presenter Jon stewart, with his ‘ dumb clown humour’; Hillary Clinton, elizabeth warren and Mitt Romney are all ‘goofy’.

every now and then, he has a craze on a particular word, using it over and over again. One of his current favourites consists of only three letters: ‘sad’. He often closes his tweets with it, which gives it the feel of a punch-line.

‘Just tried watching saturday Night Live — unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. sad!’ he tweeted on December 4, 2016.

Usually, if he closes a sentence with ‘sad’, it comes with an exclamation mark: ‘ How is Bernie sanders going to defend our country if he can’t even defend his own microphone?’ he asked on August 22 2015. And then he added: ‘Very sad!’

More often than not, he employs ‘sad’ as a term of abuse. Of U.s. talk- show host Glenn Beck, he tweeted on January 22, 2016: ‘Very few listeners. sad!’

Four months later, on May 3, 2016, came this one: ‘ wow, Lyin’ Ted Cruz really went wacko today. Made all sorts of crazy charges. Can’t function under pressure — not very presidential. sad!’ Last weekend, the President got into a Twitter spat with the film maker and political activist Michael Moore, after Moore performed a vituperative Broadway show about him . ‘while not at all presidential,’ he wrote, accurately, ‘I must point out that the sloppy Michael Moore show was a TOTAL BOMB on Broadway and was forced to close. sad!’ Needless to say, Moore refused to take this lying down. ‘You must have my smash hit of a Broadway show confused with your presidency,’ he tweeted back. ‘which is a total bomb and wILL indeed close early. NOT sAD.’ somehow, Twitter has the uncanny ability to turn everyone who uses it into a baby. Other abusive or sarcastic Trump ‘sads’ include: ‘Crooked Hillary has ZeRO leadership ability. Constantly playing the women’s card — is sad!’ (May 6, 2016), and this, tweeted to counter abuse he had received at the Oscars in 2014: ‘Certain people are ruining their reputations tonight — really sad!’ But the trouble comes when the President tries to double up his favourite term of abuse as an expression of sympathy. ‘Condolences to the family of the young woman killed today, and best regards to all of those injured, in Charlottesville, Virginia,’ he tweeted after anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer was mown down at a neo-Nazi rally on August 12 this year. ‘so sad!’

TO

Use the same word both to attack and to sympathise, to bait and to commiserate, shows the insensitivity of a shark.

‘so sad to hear of the terrorist attack in egypt,’ he tweeted in April, and in November 2016, he tweeted: ‘Bus crash in Tennessee so sad and so terrible. Condolences to all family members and loved ones.’

And so it goes on: President Trump is sad all over. Might there be a simple explanation?

The letters ‘A’, ‘s’ and ‘ D’ are next to each other on the texting keyboard, which means that ‘sAD’ is by far the easiest word to tweet, requiring the minimum expenditure of effort or thought.