His accelerating activity has become less novel to his followers.
On Thursday alone, President Trump dispatched over a half-dozen tweets attacking various aspects of the Russia investigation in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s first public statement the previous day. If it feels like President Trump’s Twitter finger has been itchier than usual of late, that’s because it has been. Having dispatched more than 42,000 tweets in the past decade, Mr. Trump has consistently been a prolific user of the social media site, but never so much as in recent months.
In his first six months in office, Mr. Trump averaged nearly six tweets a day, a lot of activity for a guy just starting into the most important job in the world. But that rate has escalated sharply since then. In the most recent half year, he averaged nearly 13 tweets and retweets a day. And in May, he has hit new highs — 671 tweets and retweets so far this month, for an average of more than 22 each day.
But as his daily tweet count has climbed, the impact of each tweet has fallen, according to calculations by Axios. At the time of his election in 2016, a Trump tweet was interacted with (meaning a retweet or a like) about 0.55 percent of the time. As the frequency of Mr. Trump’s tweets increased and the novelty of them declined, so did the response rate — down to 0.16 percent most recently. (Note that the total number of interactions with each of Mr. Trump’s tweets has increased but because his user count has risen dramatically — to 60.7 million at present — the rate of responses to Mr. Trump’s tweets has still dropped.)
Part of the recent escalation in Mr. Trump’s Twitter activity is due to the unveiling of the Mueller report. In just the roughly two months since Attorney General William Barr’s release of his summary of the report, Mr. Trump used the words “no collusion” or “no obstruction” in a tweet 62 times, approximately once a day. By comparison, in the entire previous year, he used the terms only 56 times.
But the Russia “hoax” has not been Mr. Trump’s top overall topic; that honor goes to “fake news.” Fun fact: The top tweet of Mr. Trump’s presidency was the pro wrestling video of him taking down a man with a CNN logo for a head. (930,531 interactions.)