Donald Trump breaks presidential tweeting record on frantic day

Even by Donald Trump's standards, it has been a noisy 24 hours. From railing against Greta Thunberg at Davos to crying injustice at his impeachment trial in Washington, the US president has had a lot to talk about. So it was not surprising that on Wednesday he set a new tweeting record.

Mr Trump smashed through his previous record of 123 tweets by only 4.25pm in Washington - and kept going. By midnight on Wednesday he had posted on Twitter 131 times.

The most online president in US history tweeted and retweeted at length about the Senate impeachment hearings, Democrats, the election and more on his favourite platform.

The president has been a committed tweeter since before entering the White House and has infamously tweeted gaffes and typos like "covfefe" and calling himself a "stable genius".

He once shared a quote from Benito Mussolini that had been attributed to himself, and appeared to have fired Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, by tweet.

His Twitter use has fundamentally changed the way in which Americans - and the rest of the world - understand the role, daily life and psyche of the US president, normalising a type of communication that before his presidency would have seemed bizarre. Not since President Nixon's meticulous and paranoid tape recordings have Americans had such close access to the unfiltered thoughts of their leader.

According to Factba.se, a service that compiles and analyses data on the Trump administration, his previous record was set on December 12, 2019, the day the House Judiciary Committee opened its hearing to approve two articles of impeachment against the president.

His all-time record was 161 posts in January 2015, before he became president, but Mr Trump shows no signs that he might be becoming more restrained. Most of his tweets on that day were to plug The Apprentice, his reality TV show.

Starting his day at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, he had thrashed out 41 tweets by 7am in Davos. The majority of his posts to more than 71 million followers were retweets from Republican lawmakers who were attacking the Democrats over the impeachment trial.

His tweets included a blitz on Adam Schiff, one of the Democrat impeachment managers, a tweet calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat congresswoman, an "embarrassing, barely literate moron", and an image of himself walking in front of a enormous fire that is designed to symbolise Mr Trump's destruction of the US "deep state". In another tweet he called Tom Steyer, the Democratic presidential candidate, “a major loser”.