Long before he ran for president, Donald Trump build a massive political support base on one issue: birtherism. He was the biggest public booster of the nonsense theory that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was fake, and that he had secretly been born in Kenya.
Birtherism shook the Republican Party, galvanising the highly influential Tea Party movement and, at its height, putting doubt in the mind of a quarter of Americans. Trump kept going after Obama released his full birth certificate in 2011, and this tweet was a foretaste of campaigns and conspiracy theories to come.
2. Rattling the stock market
During the election, Trump promised that he would give up tweeting as president. This tweet, sent just before he took office in early 2017, augured otherwise, and showed how willing he was to influence markets and use the power of his position to target private companies.
That behaviour continued after Trump’s inauguration, leading analysts at JP Morgan Chase to create a special index to monitor his impact on interest rates. Others at Bank of America found that the stock market tended to fall on days when Trump tweeted more than 35 times, and rise when he tweeted less than 5.
3. Anyone for covfefe?
"Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ???" Trump later asked. "Enjoy!" The world obeyed. His bizarre half-tweet was meme-ified at lightning speed and became obnoxious just as quickly, inspiring merchandise, a race horse name and a ban on "COVFEFE" licence plates in the state of Georgia.
While silly, the reaction illustrated Trump’s ability to confound his critics and inspire love in his supporters. To the latter group, liberals mocking his spelling looked like elitist pedants nitpicking a man who had proudly dubbed himself the saviour of the "poorly educated".
4. Punching CNN
To some, this video of Trump beating a major news network in a wrestling match was a madcap joke; to others, it was a chilling threat to journalists. Yet its real significance was its origin: plucked from Trump’s wide and often virulent online fanbase, without the knowledge its creator.
Extremists took notice. Over the next three years, they competed with each other to drive attention and traffic to their communities by attempting to injecting their ideas and symbols into the Twitter feeds of Trump’s 89m followers. Trump frequently obliged, at one point boosting the British fascist group Britain First.
5. A very stable genius
Trump’s response to questions about his mental stability have gone down in history as the epitome of protesting too much. His phrasing inspired a book, a parody song to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Modern Major General’, and even a proposed law, the STABLE GENIUS bill, standing "Standardising Testing and Accountability Before Large Elections Giving Electors Necessary Information for Unobstructed Selection" (that is, publishing candidates’ medical exams).
A closer inspection would suggest that Trump’s wording was laced with irony ("like, really smart") and a rare self-awareness. As with Covfefe, he owned the phrase, using it three more times – now with Capital Letters.
6. Threatening nuclear annihilation
In January 2018, Trump had memorably taunted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by tweeting about his "bigger and more powerful" nuclear button. Such a naked threat of nuclear force sent a chill round the world, but it was only banter next to his missive to Iran’s leader in July.
Diplomats were forced to accept the reality that the world’s only superpower might tip itself into a bloody conflict on the basis of a late-night message that bypassed military officials. Trump later formalised this doctrine, tweeting last January that his tweets would suffice to legally notify Congress of a war.
It was a mirror of his approach to domestic policy, under which he had summarily banned transgender people from serving in the military with a tweeted decree.
7. Supercharging anti-lockdown protests
During the first peak of America’s pandemic, when the virus was killing more than 2,000 people every day, Trump’s endorsement of anti-lockdown protests in three Democrat-led states helped trigger cascade of online radicalisation that culminated in this week’s violence on Capitol Hill.
Though his tweets were posted in response to peaceful protests, extremists took them as a prompt for more violent rebellion. Worse, the boost he gave to anti-lockdown groups on social media appears to have accelerated their "cross-pollination" with other fringe movements such as anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, armed militias and QAnon, dragging their believers together into one overboiling cauldron.
8. Threatening a military response to the George Floyd protests
Trump’s bellicose response to the George Floyd protests was highly unpopular, and there was no starker example of it than his "when the looting starts" tweet. As well as being widely shared in its own right, the message created a firestorm for social media companies.
Twitter chose to restrict the tweet for glorifying violence, earning fury from Trump and his allies, but Facebook’s decision to leave the same post online also prompted a giant backlash from its advertisers and employees. After that, both Facebook and Twitter began to act more strictly against Trump and his more extreme supporters, setting the stage for Friday’s ban.
9. ‘I have Covid’
Trump’s announcement that he had contracted Covid-19 was his most retweeted and liked tweet ever. Sent in the small hours of the morning, it ended speculation over whether snowballing infections within the White House had reached the commander in chief, and started new speculation over whether he could stay in the job.
He could, and did, and his recovery became a central motif of the last month of his campaign. "President Trump is a warrior," a fundraising email said. "I DEFEATED the coronavirus," said a text message after he left hospital.
10. Four Seasons Total Landscaping
Few of us get to choose where we make our last stand, but most of us hope it will be dignified. Donald Trump met his Waterloo just across the road from a crematorium and around the corner from a sex shop, in the car park outside a small Philadelphia business that shared its name with a famous hotel chain.
As the slow trickle of election results swung towards Joe Biden, Trump’s legal team hoped to seize the initiative with a press conference alleging electoral fraud. The President’s subsequent correction plunged that effort into farce.
We still don’t really know how they ended up at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, nor why Trump got the location wrong. It was a surreal, bleakly comical end to the most polarising presidency in recent US history. Sad.
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