Extensive breakdown finds Trump’s posting addiction is spiraling into 'mania'

If it seems like President Donald Trump is only getting more and more addicted to posting on social media as his second term rots away, that would be right on the money, as an extensive breakdown from the Daily Beast found his habit is officially spiraling into "mania."

Trump has long appeared to be outright addicted to posting online, dating back to his Twitter attacks against Barack Obama, and lasting all the way through his first term in the White House, when he would seem to direct official policies via personal tweets. Now, after temporarily getting banned from the platform after the Jan. 6 attacks, he does the vast majority of his posting on his own site, Truth Social, and his worst tendencies have only gotten worse during his second term.

Amidst all of that, the Daily Beast has been tracking Trump's usage of Truth Social on a month-by-month basis, and in a new report from Tuesday, revealed that his habit "exploded to an unprecedented level in May," dwarfing his own posting record from past months by a considerable margin, marking his "most prolific month" on social media since the start of his second term, when one would assume he had better things to be doing.

"We calculated that his average posts per day spiked to 27, or the equivalent of just over once every hour of every day," reporter Josh Fiallo detailed in the report. "Our analysis found that Trump posted on Truth Social an astounding 861 times last month, sharing everything from truly deranged AI-generated memes to meltdowns and even an image of him lounging shirtless in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with a bikini-clad woman."

He continued later: "Trump’s posting frequency was a sharp increase over April, when the Daily Beast calculated that Trump posted an average of 18 times a day. That month he could have received a full night’s sleep on only five nights given his late-night and early-morning posting. The Beast’s new analysis found that May was Trump’s most prolific month on Truth Social since he returned to the White House, eclipsing his previous high of 782 posts and reposts in January."

The report further compared Trump's current habits to his first term, noting that in May 2018, he posted on Twitter a total of 238 times, which would have been "widely viewed as a significant amount at the time." Even more damning, the report found that such an amount would actually represent the "quietest" month of Trump's second term if it happened now, and by a massive margin. The slowest month on Truth Social of his second term, September of last year, saw 430 posts in total.

Much of Trump's posting now is helped along by executive assistant Natalie Harp, who reportedly "brings Trump stacks of printed-out drafts of social media posts — many of them recycling content from other accounts—for him to approve."

"Sources tell the [Wall Street] Journal that Trump posts some messages himself while Harp presses publish on others without approval from Chief of Staff Susie Wiles or communications staff — something that has angered some in the president’s inner circle," the report noted. "At a minimum, Trump views every post before it goes public, the paper reported."