A farewell to @realDonaldTrump, gone after 57,000 tweets

President Donald Trump reaches into his suit jacket regarding the events in Charlottesville, Va., as he speaks to the media in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Aug. 15, 2017. [File Photo: AP]

@realDonaldTrump frequently spread misleading, false and malicious assertions, such as the baseless ideas that protesters at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings were paid by the liberal philanthropist George Soros and that November’s election was beset by voter fraud.

Trump often tweeted well past midnight and before dawn, a cathartic outlet for grievances (Witch hunt! Crooked Hillary, Russia, Russia, Russia, FAKE NEWS, and so on.) For the most part, @realDonaldTrump and its 280-character posts effectively allowed Trump to work around the Washington media establishment and amplify the message of allies.

Sometimes @realDonaldTrump stumbled. Trump deleted 1,166 tweets and, in his final months on the platform, had 471 tweets flagged by Twitter for misinformation, according to Factba.se.

In one of his most memorable Twitter stumbles, Trump in May 2017 sent (and later deleted) a cryptic post-midnight tweet that read “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

The gibberish set the Twitterverse afire with speculation. Theories included that the tweeter-in-chief had fallen asleep mid-message and that the man who once bragged of having “the best words” was adding a new word to the lexicon to properly describe collusion between Democrats and the press.

The mystery was never solved.

Sam Nunberg, a longtime — and now former — Trump adviser, said that in the summer of 2011, after Trump announced he wasn’t running in 2012 but wanted to remain relevant, his team decided to start using social media to boost his profile.

They chose to focus on Twitter, where he already had an account and several hundred thousand followers. Nunberg remembers sending Trump daily reports on his follower growth. Trump would sometimes hand it back with hand-written notes — “Why not more?” “Why so slow?”

They celebrated when they hit the million mark.

“Twitter definitely played a pivotal role in building Donald Trump as a political figure within Republican politics and he also greatly enjoyed it,” said Nunberg. “Remember he used to say: ‘I wanted to own a newspaper. This is great, it’s like a newspaper without the losses.’”

Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to Twitter shortly after the platform banned @realDonaldTrump to note that it continues to allow Iran’s supreme leader “and numerous other dictatorial regimes” to use the platform, but cannot abide his father.

“Mao would be proud,” Trump Jr. scoffed.

In the end, @realDonaldTrump offered an in-the-moment peek into Trump's state of mind over more than a decade, a period in which the “Apprentice” TV star transformed into the 45th American president.

Down the road, when historians look for a glimpse into Trump thoughts on the issues of his time -- anything from actress Kristen Stewart's treatment of co-star Robert Pattinson to the president's views on Russian meddling in the 2016 election — the first stop may inevitably be one of the many digital archives that have preserved the tweets of @realDonaldTrump.

With Trump, whatever the topic, there's always a tweet for that.