Six months of the Iran war – as told through Trump’s social media posts

This week marks six months since the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran.

In that time, US President Donald Trump has published at least 319 posts mentioning Iran on Truth Social, his social media platform – roughly one every 14 hours.

Read in sequence, these posts, or “truths” as they are known on the platform, form a record of how a war was announced, prosecuted, declared won, negotiated and then reopened, all in the president’s own words.

Between February 28 and August 25, Trump posted at least 4,189 times on Truth Social, an average of 24 posts a day, or one every hour. One in every 13 mentioned Iran – 319 posts in total, or one every 14 hours.

While he posted at all hours, the most common time for his Iran posts was the morning in Washington, between 8 and 11am (13:00-16:00 GMT), corresponding to early evening in Tehran.

The word cloud below provides a snapshot of the most commonly used terms. “Iran” dominates at 510 mentions, more than three times the next word. But the two that follow are not Iran’s leaders or its nuclear programme: they are his own name and his own country.

Trump refers to himself as “President Donald J Trump” or “President DJT” 221 times, more often than he mentions the Strait of Hormuz, nuclear weapons and Israel combined.

His sign-off, “Thank you for your attention to this matter”, closes one in every four posts.