President Donald Trump may have given up his weekly primetime TV slot as host of “Celebrity Apprentice,” but since he took the oath of office, every day is a new episode of Trump’s White House — on Twitter.
In his first 50 days as President of the United States, Trump has never skipped a day communicating with the country via @RealDonaldTrump, tweeting more than 260 times since Inauguration Day.
That’s an average of 36 tweets per week. By comparison, Barack Obama tweeted from the now-archived @POTUS account a total of 352 times since the handle was created in May 2015.
157: # of tweeted exclamation points
Despite poor initial ratings — a majority of Americans across party lines say that Trump’s use of Twitter is generally a bad idea, according to January polling from NBC News and the WSJ — the president shows no sign of slowing down.
We analyzed every tweet sent from @RealDonaldTrump since January 20th. Here’s what we’ve deduced:
Tune In Around 8:22 a.m. ET
Rise and shine. It’s time for a message from the president.
Donald Trump has only given five in-person press conferences since taking office (four of them jointly conducted with foreign leaders), but he addresses the country every morning on Twitter, as early as 6 o’clock in the morning.
The average time for a morning tweet? 8:22 a.m. ET — on particularly stormy mornings, Trump will send as many as seven tweets in a row.
Trump’s morning tweets are often directly related to a cable news interview or front page headline, including specific references to his professed favorite morning show, “Fox and Friends.”
Trump also follows headlines from The New York Times, The New York Post and tunes into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” according to a NYTimes report, and will react to those headlines. Nearly half of the 43 accounts Trump follows on Twitter are media handles.
Roughly 88 percent of morning tweets — those sent before around noon — come from Trump’s Android device, the personal phone he used during the 2016 campaign and where we typically hear the president most unfiltered.
The switch from Android to iPhone — the smartphone his staff reportedly uses to tweet for the president — takes place at an average time of 1:22 p.m. ET. During iPhone hours, @RealDonaldTrump is useful for following the president’s meetings, interview schedule and developments with executive orders and other official business.
13: # of times Trump tweeted “I will” vs. 7: # of times Trump tweeted “we will”
Some days, Trump will go back to his Android, typically around 6:24 p.m. ET, and resume tweeting in the same vein as those early morning messages.
How to spot the handoff? Pay attention to these common words sent from each device:
Trump’s Tweets Impact His Approval Rating
Trump’s most incendiary tweets have often either come in the midst of a particularly trying time for the president (e.g. his use of the medium to decry “fake news” after various outlets have reported on potential contacts between his team and Russia), or they have kicked off their own unique and dizzying news cycle (e.g. his accusations that Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped.’”)
9: # of Make America Great Again tweets
We looked at the relationship between his most frequent negative or critical tweets and his overall disapproval rating, according to Gallup’s three-day rolling average.
Generally, the Gallup disapproval number has tended to tick up by a few points in the wake of his most prolific tweetstorms — those that take aim at a foe, complain about press coverage or are simply off-message from the White House’s purported goals of the day.
There Are Three Major Targets
Trump’s targets on Twitter are broken down into three categories: media, celebrities and politicians — with the occasional entire country thrown in.
