This morning at around 6:00 AM ET, President Trump went on what some people are referring to as a “retweet rampage.” He literally retweeted 53 tweets made by individuals claiming to either be or know of firefighters who support the Trump presidency.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
This, of course, came after Joe Biden was able to get an endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) — an endorsement that quite clearly has Trump disturbed.
Trump’s long series of nearly 5-dozen retweets came in about a 30 minute timespan. For those who have their smartphones set to notify them when the president tweets, they literally received over 50 notifications between 6 AM and 6:30AM ET this morning, surely frustrating some of them.
HillReporter tracked the number of people following Trump on Twitter during and after his “rampage.” At 6:00AM ET, the president had 59,949,138 followers. In the 10 minutes after his last tweet, his follower count had fallen by approximately 500. By 7:30 AM, an hour and a half after Trump’s first retweet, his follower count had fallen all the way down to 59,947,988. In all, he had lost 1150 followers in the aftermath of his “rampage.”
There is no way of telling just why Trump lost these followers, but undoubtedly his long series of retweets played a role.
Many twitter users mocked the president for his rampage of retweets, including some who pointed out that the president actually retweeted “a bot”:
Well I guess based on the volume of tweets and retweets this morning it’s safe to say the IAFF firefighters endorsement of Biden may have gotten under Trumps skin. I haven’t awoken to this many Trump twitter alerts in a long time. And he hasn’t stopped.
It will be interesting to see if Trump attempts one of these “retweet rampages” again, considering how much we all know he takes so much pride in his follower count.
Eddie Krassenstein has been a journalist and editor for various news organizations ranging from politics to technology and entrepreneurship for the past 15+ years.
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