Michael Shear

Two months after President Biden took office, his top digital adviser emailed officials at Facebook urging them to do more to limit the spread of “vaccine hesitancy” on the social media platform. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 “misinformation” posts. And in the summer of 2021, the surgeon general’s top aide repeatedly urged Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to combat disinformation.

When President Donald Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power. Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president’s Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump’s messages.

President Trump abruptly issued an executive order demanding an evaluation of the Postal Service’s finances, asserting the power of his office weeks after accusing Amazon, the online retail giant, of not paying its fair share in postage. In the executive order, issued just before 9 p.m., President Trump created a task force to examine the service’s “unsustainable financial path” and directed the new panel to “conduct a thorough evaluation of the operations and finances of the USPS” The president does not mention Amazon in the order, but it is clear that he intends for the panel to substanti

Just days after the November election, top aides to Donald Trump huddled with congressional staff members in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s suite of offices at the Capitol. The objective: not to get things done, but to undo them — quickly.

For about three months after Inauguration Day, President Trump would have the power to wipe away some of his predecessor’s most significant regulations with simple-majority votes from his allies in Congress. But the clock was ticking. An obscure law known as the Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers 60 legislative days to overturn major new regulations issued by federal agencies. After that window closes, sometime in early May, the process gets much more difficult: Executive orders by the president can take years to unwind regulations — well beyond the important 100-day yardstick for new administrations. So in weekly meetings leading up to Jan. 20, the Trump aides and lawmakers worked from a shared Excel spreadsheet to develop a list of possible targets: rules enacted late in Barack Obama’s presidency that they viewed as a vast regulatory overreach that was stifling economic growth. The result was a historic reversal of government rules in record time.

America inaugurated two very different presidents on Jan 20.

One, who goes by the Twitter handle @POTUS, is gracious, understated and humble. Since taking office, @POTUS has posted seven messages, three of them merely to say thank you. The second president is the more familiar one. Posting to Twitter under the handle @realDonaldTrump, he is full of braggadocio, prone to leave out facts, sometimes harshly critical of his adversaries and more than a bit thin-skinned. In a half-dozen Twitter messages since his inauguration, @realDonaldTrump boasted about “GREAT reviews” for his Inaugural Address and noted with pride that 31 million people in the United States had watched his inauguration on television — making sure to note that it was more than the number who watched President Obama’s inauguration four years ago.

The two Twitter accounts are, of course, different handles for the same man. The @realDonaldTrump account, Trump’s personal account since March 2009, has 21.4 million followers. The @POTUS account, the official presidential handle, which he inherited, has 14.3 million followers. Trump’s personal account simply identifies him as “45th President of the United States of America.” The bio on the official account adds: “Tweets by @DanScavino. Tweets by #POTUS signed -DJT.” (Dan Scavino is the new White House social media director.) So far, none of the official posts have been signed -DJT, even the one that reads, “On behalf of my entire family, THANK YOU!”

Thirty years as a union boss in Indiana have given Chuck Jones a thick skin. But even threats to shoot him or burn his house down did not quite prepare him for becoming the target of a verbal takedown by the next president of the United States.

In what one Republican strategist described as “cyberbullying,” President-elect Donald J. Trump derided Jones on Twitter, accusing him of doing “a terrible job representing workers” and blaming him for the decisions by companies that ship American jobs overseas. The messages continued Mr. Trump’s pattern of digital assaults, most of them aimed at his political rivals, reporters, Hollywood celebrities or female accusers. But rarely has Trump used Twitter to express his ire at people like Jones, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, who described himself as “just a regular working guy.” With the full power of the presidency just weeks away, Trump’s decision to single out Jones for ridicule has drawn condemnation from historians and White House veterans.

President-elect Donald Trump chose Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a loyal campaign adviser, to be his White House chief of staff, turning to a Washington insider whose friendship with the House speaker, Paul Ryan, could help secure early legislative victories. President-elect Trump named Stephen Bannon, a right-wing media provocateur, his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist, signaling an embrace of the fringe ideology long advanced by Bannon and of a continuing disdain for the Republican establishment.

The dual appointments — with Bannon given top billing in the official announcement — instantly created rival centers of power in the Trump White House. Bannon’s selection demonstrated the power of grass-roots activists who backed Trump’s candidacy. Some of them have long traded in the conspiracy theories and sometimes racist messages of Breitbart News, the website that Bannon ran for much of the past decade.