Twitter has emerged as the last forum to hear directly from Donald Trump, and it has taken on an outsize importance amid speculation about how Trump will govern. | Getty Trump’s Twitter feed has suddenly gotten a lot more interesting With the president-elect in seclusion for transition work, his tweets are the only direct channel into his thinking.

For months, Washington has hung on Donald Trump’s every word, watching him savage critics and inflame controversy with his steady stream of rallies, interviews and tweets, eager for any sign he might be pivoting to a more presidential posture.

Now, with the president-elect holed up in Trump Tower or his Bedminster golf club, Twitter has emerged as the last forum to hear directly from Trump, and it has taken on an outsize importance amid speculation about how Trump, new to Washington and basic political convention, will govern.


“I think the way Donald Trump tweets, everything he says is a potential smoke signal for what he thinks and how he’ll act in office,” said Vincent Harris, the former chief digital strategist for Sen. Rand Paul who also briefly did some work for the Trump campaign.

Outside his interview with “60 Minutes” last weekend and a brief press availability at the White House, Trump has not spoken publicly since his surprise election on Nov. 8, but he has kept up his Twitter feed, albeit at a slower pace. He has sent a few dozen messages, some of them from an Android device, usually a sign that Trump wrote them himself.

For political observers wondering whether President-elect Trump will quit being impulsive and divisive, Twitter is keeping them in suspense.

The president-elect had started out solid, tweeting a traditionally gracious message on Nov. 9 following his shocking upset over Hillary Clinton, who was leading in most national polls and maintained a slight edge in many swing states. “Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before,” he wrote at 6:36 a.m.

On the evening of Nov. 10, he kept up the congenial posture, tweeting a kind of thank-you to the Obamas after they hosted him and his wife Melania at the White House for a tour. “A fantastic day in D.C. Met with President Obama for first time. Really good meeting, great chemistry. Melania liked Mrs. O a lot!” the tweet at 9:10 p.m. read.

But things started getting wobbly a few minutes later. Apparently incensed at the anti-Trump protests brewing in cities across the country, the president-elect was back to lashing out. “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!” he tweeted at 9:19 p.m.

And in one of the more telling tweets, Trump followed up the next day to clean up that message. At 6:14 a.m., he wrote, “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!”

Each message has drawn a round of commentary on — of course — Twitter, and cable news network analysts have picked them apart. Democrats are already using his ongoing outbursts to taunt him as unhinged. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked, seriously, whether Kellyanne Conway or another adviser should change the president-elect’s password “so he no longer has access to his Twitter feed.”

So far, Trump’s Twitter feed is considerably more restrained than his campaign days, when he regularly called Ted Cruz a liar and retweeted messages from questionable accounts, including one that described the Fox News host Megyn Kelly as a “bimbo.”

During his “60 Minutes” interview, Trump had promised to tone it down, as most political operatives say he should, given that, as president, he could spark market shifts, incite riots or set off international incidents with the wrong move.

“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all, I’m going to do very restrained,” he assured Lesley Stahl, who had asked him if he was “going to be tweeting and whatever you’re upset about” as president.

But in the days since the interview aired, Trump has not kept his word. Among other missives, he took to Twitter to respond to a New York Times report that characterized his phone calls to world leaders as “haphazard” and his transition as in disarray.

“The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition. It is going so smoothly. Also, I have spoken to many foreign leaders,” he wrote at 7:12 a.m. on Nov. 16.

He also dismissed the newspaper’s reporters and editors as “just upset that they looked like fools in their coverage of me.”

On Saturday morning, Trump picked a fight with the beloved cast of the Broadway hit "Hamilton," after Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed when he attended the show Friday night. A cast member also delivered a statement from the stage, celebrating the "diverse America."

"The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!" Trump tweeted.

Noting Trump’s behavior on Twitter in the first week following the election, Harris concluded: “Everyone who thought Donald Trump’s Twitter account was going off in the dark of night was sorely mistaken.”

Harris, for his part, said he finds Trump’s candor on social media “refreshing.” Not everyone views Trump’s Twitter profile that way, though, and so some skeptics are still eyeing it hesitantly, hoping to see him calm down.

To Democrats and critics within his own party, @realDonaldTrump came to embody their many objections to the candidate during the campaign — his lack of experience in the more polished realm of establishment politics, his targeted insults of large swaths of the electorate, his defensive and vengeful impulses that at times bordered on erratic and self-destructive. Rants he recorded on the platform long before he sought the presidency resurfaced, feuds with news outlets made headlines, and a 3 a.m. attack on a beauty queen he once complained was too fat compounded a deterioration of his standing in the polls.

But it also fanned the enthusiasm of his millions of followers, who heralded him as authentic and a welcome foil to the political establishment they so hated.

“Trump has blown up the rules on Twitter,” said Ryan Williams, recalling that 22 people had to approve tweets for Mitt Romney’s account when he worked on his 2012 communications team.

Dick Wadhams, a Republican operative, says he appreciates how Twitter was a powerful tool for Trump when he ran for president. But he argued that Trump has no choice but to restrain himself and use it in a more traditional way going forward — in conjunction with a broader communications strategy, with staff members involved.

“He can’t just wake up at 3 a.m. and start firing off tweets,” Wadhams said. If Trump continues to use it to attack people, he added, “he will diminish his stature as the president.”

“That’s all there is to it,” Wadhams said. “It’s not worth it.”

Still, for some of his critics, Twitter is low on a long list of worries about what Trump will do as president.

William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a prominent conservative who opposed Trump, said by email: “I've got to say that Twitter is the least of my concerns about Trump. If an occasional Tweet — however ‘unpresidential’ — helps him vent a bit, and then he can calm down when he actually has to make decisions, we can all live with it.”

To that point, the debate over how Trump should use Twitter may just be a proxy for how he should act as president, period.

“If his message is offensive or counterproductive, it doesn’t matter if it’s on Twitter or Facebook or to The New York Times,” said Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary for President George W. Bush.

