In interview with The Sunday Times, Trump says he'll keep using @realDonaldTrump Twitter account
With President-elect Donald Trump on the brink of officially becoming the country's Commander-in-Chief, it appears we are getting the answer to what he will do with his personal Twitter account …
Context & Ripple Effects
Days before the 2017 inauguration, Trump told The Sunday Times he would keep tweeting from @realDonaldTrump rather than consolidate onto the official presidential handle — a choice that kept his most direct channel outside the government's account structure. That decision is what made the 2021 handoff so consequential: when Twitter outlined its plan to transition @POTUS and other official handles to Biden while archiving them, the personal account stayed Trump's property, untouched by the transfer.
The arc closes in late 2022, when Trump said he saw "a lot of problems at Twitter" and would stick to Truth Social instead of returning. The personal account he insisted on keeping in 2017 ended up being the thing a platform could cut him off from — which is exactly what pushed him toward an owned channel.
First-order effects
- Keeping @realDonaldTrump separate from @POTUS means Trump's tweets remain personal speech on a commercial platform, not records of an official government account — the distinction Twitter's 2020-21 transfer planning was built around.
Second-order effects
- Because the president's loudest channel sits on a private company's terms of service, Twitter inherits moderation decisions no other platform faces — pressure that culminates in the permanent suspension and Trump's exit to Truth Social.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward political figures treating platform access as contingent and building owned alternatives: the personal-account era ends not with a return to official handles but with a rival network built around one man's audience.
The trend: Presidential communication is migrating from rented reach on mainstream platforms to owned channels, with the personal-vs-official account split marking where the leverage shifted.