Now that he’s been banned we can say it: Donald Trump was a genius at

On 8 January, Twitter indefinitely suspended the account of one Donald J Trump, president of the United States. Banning Trump from Twitter is a little like banning E coli from your large intestine: even if he never comes back, the memories will be enough.

Trump used the social media platform in a way that no figure in American government has ever managed before. Between last November and 6 January, when a mob of his supporters briefly overran the US Capitol and interrupted the certification of the 2020 electoral college vote, he used it to whip his followers into a frenzy. The riot was the reprehensible end to an extraordinary online career. Over the course of his presidency, Trump did for Twitter what James Dean did for the open-top sports car, making a cultural touchstone of a vehicle that ultimately destroyed him.

In the wake of his suspension, some have suggested Trump was the greatest Twitter user – or “poster” – of all time. I’m not sure that’s true. It raises the question of what great posting is. The first criterion is intangible: great posters are very much themselves, not just communicating ideas but iterating with each tweet a character – one that offers both a candid presentation of their thoughts and a knowing, semi-ironic performance of them. The second criteria is that lots of people read it. By these metrics, the greatest Twitter user of all time is probably @dril, an anonymous account that has accumulated 1.6 million followers by posting stuff like this:

Dril’s Isil tweet spawned a Twitter cliche: users now commonly remark that “you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them” in situations where a public figure is forced to walk back a previous statement. If such influence is the measure of success as a poster, then you do, under these circumstances, gotta hand it to Trump: his Twitter account truly shaped the culture.

Consider the Trumpian Sad. Trump first concluded a tweet with the exclamation “Sad!” in December 2011, in reference to his belief that former Walter Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel should not appear on Fox News. His use of this odd affectation increased after he announced his candidacy for president. A classic example from 25 November 2015:

“The numbers at the @nytimes are so dismal, especially advertising revenue, that big help will be needed fast. A once great institution – SAD!”

The key, here, is that he is not actually sad. The inherent humour of using “Sad!” as an exclamation – a thing people simply do not blurt out when they are overcome – is compounded by the sense that Trump is in fact revelling in the (imagined/falsified) decline of the New York Times, a newspaper he makes no secret of despising. This crocodile-tears expression would become a motif of his posting during his…