Twitter followers

President Trump, who has embraced Twitter as his principal means for communicating with his base, has 41.8 million followers. That’s a lot — more than double Hillary Clinton’s 19.5 million followers.

Yet Trump comes up well short of his immediate predecessor. Former president Barack Obama has 96.5 million followers. Obama is behind only Katy Perry and Justin Bieber on Twitter in terms of the number of followers.

Finally, we have George H.W. Bush, the only president from the Bush family with a Twitter handle. The elder Bush has 293,000 followers.

It remains to be seen whether Twitter will benefit from the attention it’s attracting right now (which it desperately needs to). But either way, there’s no question it has become a much larger part of the political dialogue. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Twitter.