RIP to the World’s Greatest Poster of All Time, @RealDonaldTrump

Goodnight, sweet prince.

Jan 8, 2021

Not since the burning of the library at Alexandria have we lost so much culture in one fell swoop: On Friday night, after normal business hours, Twitter permanently banned our sitting president, Donald Trump, from the social media site, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence" after a bunch of pro-Trump weirdos stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

It's about as courageous of Twitter to ban Trump with less than two weeks in his presidency as it is of the rats in his Cabinet who are resigning this week. And it's inarguable that Trump used Twitter for evil ends. There's a strong case to be made that he was elected because of Twitter, where he'd spent years building a mass following for years by tweeting about petty grievances about Graydon Carter and Diet Coke and eventually to fan the flames of Obama-era birtherism.

He also used Twitter to announce some of his worst policies—like the Muslim travel ban—and a slew of others that freaked everyone out for a day but never came to pass. By doing so, and being an absolute buffoon the likes of which we'd rarely before, he also laid to rest even the most threadbare lies we could tell ourselves about American exceptionalism or somehow being better or made of stronger stuff than the rest of the world.

This story is not about weighing the moral implications of Trump's use of Twitter, or his reprehensible actions just in the last two days. It's also not for expounding at length about the free speech implications (hint: not good!) of a private company being the arbiter of what's acceptable, protected speech. This is simply about acknowledging that, through years of increasingly mind-crushing tweets, Trump ascended the mountain to become possibly the most iconically brain-poisoned poster of all time. Below, we've catalogued some of the most memorably insane posts of a man who was born for the media, and who stayed on top of his (posting) game until the end. Good night, sweet prince.

The Tweets About His "Haters"