President Trump loves his Twitter account. He employed the direct-to-the-people platform during the campaign, and then continued to ruffle feathers with blistering tweets even after taking a seat in the Oval Office.
“With a generous helping of exclamation points, ALL CAPS and spelling errors, 2017 was the first year of the first Twitter presidency. And in a way, President Trump’s most popular tweets of the year tell the story of his presidency. These statements on Twitter gave Americans and the world an unprecedented real-time view of what Trump was thinking, stewing over and watching on cable.
“My use of social media is not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL,” Trump’s account tweeted on July 1, finishing with a flourish that appeared often in his tweets: “Make America Great Again!”
Trump made policy — or at least tried to — via Twitter (For example: The transgender military ban was announced in a series of tweets before his communications team and Defense Department were prepared to respond). He taunted adversaries domestic and international, endorsed candidates (some who won, two who lost in the same Senate race), played media critic, catered to his base supporters and, more than anything, drove news cycles and American conversation day in and day out.
As he explained to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business in late October, “When I put it out, you put it immediately on your show. I mean, the other day, I put something out. Two seconds later, I’m watching your show. It’s up.”
It’s the president’s way of going around the media filter directly to his voters while at the same time reaching broad swaths of news consumers who may not even have accounts on the social network.
The most retweeted posts tend to stoke more controversy than those on the list of most favorited. On the favorited list, there are several optimistic tweets posted around the time of the inauguration, for instance.
Here are Trump’s Top 10 most retweeted and favorited tweets of 2017.”
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