Why has Trump started using this weirdly formal sign-off on social media posts about Iran?
Several eyebrows were raised to full mast on Tuesday morning when a visibly upset President Trump dropped an f-bomb on live TV. In response to a reporter’s question about the tentative ceasefire between Israel and Iran, Trump replied that the two countries “have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f-ck they’re doing,” possibly the first time a U.S. president has purposefully unloaded that term on camera.
Although Trump’s use of one of the cruder expletives would’ve been jarring at any other time, there’s a reason it might have sounded even more discordant than usual at this moment. It’s because lately the president has taken to signing off all his posts about the conflict between Israel and Iran with an oddly formal flourish: “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
While the contrast of Tuesday’s f-bomb is giving linguistic whiplash, it also highlights the baffling nature of Trump’s new social media signature—something that users of X and Bluesky have already been unpacking for days.
Before last Saturday, Trump had used the cumbersome sign-off only twice before, with a pair of posts commemorating Easter Sunday on April 20.
However, after announcing on Saturday that the United States had carried out bombing strikes on three nuclear facilities in Iran, he began using the prolix word-dump a lot more. It has quickly become a hallmark of his messaging in every step of the unfurling conflict—from warning Iran not to retaliate, to dismissing its “weak” retaliation; from announcing that the two countries had reached a ceasefire, to demanding that Israel stick to it.
Trump’s branding constantly evolves
One potential reason for this new posting habit is that Trump is a consummate troubleshooter, and this may just be the latest evolution of his social media branding.
Earlier this year, for example, he augmented his standard “MAGA!” sign-off, by adding the all-business valediction: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump’s verbose new sign-off could either be a way to further make his posts read like boilerplate business letters, or it’s just something he’s throwing against the wall to see whether his supporters want him to stick with it.
Another reason might be to distinguish certain posts among the greater deluge of social media content he produces. Given that Truth Social—the platform Trump owns and where his posts live—is estimated to have only 5 million members, most people likely encounter Trump’s posts only through media reports and screenshots on bigger platforms such as X and Bluesky.
So it might be a shock to learn that the Truth Social posts that break containment represent just a tiny fraction of the president’s prodigious output on the platform. According to the The Washington Post, Trump posted to Truth Social over 2,200 times in the first 132 days of his presidency.
The tedious sign-off could be an over-the-top way to differentiate his posts from the myriad dispatches by his social media team, something he’s been doing throughout the year with the more brevity-friendly “DJT.”
What seems most likely, though, is that Trump simply wants to imbue his posts about this geopolitical conflict with extra gravitas. He is notoriously obsessed with people who look the part (for instance, by talking about cabinet appointments in terms of “central casting”), and so perhaps this official-sounding sign-off is what he thinks a commander in chief is supposed to sound like during wartime.
In any case, Trump’s new habit of ending posts with his full name and title, as though introducing himself in an icebreaker activity at work, has garnered a range of reactions online.
A lot of X users have commented on the obviously unnecessary nature of it, while some posters on Bluesky have speculated about whether Trump thinks the formal sign-off confers special powers to his posts, making them inviolable.
People on both sites rejoiced when the president accidentally misspelled his first name as “Donakd” in a post with the long-winded farewell.
Several social media users have also pointed out the similarities between Trump’s new communication style and how their elderly relatives end texts to the family.
On Bluesky, the most common response has perhaps been from users incorporating Trump’s new long goodbye into the repertoire when mimicking his bizarre, singular style.
Like most things this president does, it has already become a meme.
Considering that Trump has almost exclusively used this lengthy sign-off in posts about acts related to war, it may be for the benefit of humanity if we never see it again.
