Barack Obama stepped away from the presidency after two terms, but he will never relinquish his role as Dad-in-chief. That much was made clear in his first tweet as a private citizen in eight years.
Hi everybody! Back to the original handle. Is this thing still on? Michelle and I are off on a quick vacation, then we’ll get back to work.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 20, 2017
The “dad, husband, President, citizen” followed that with a call to action for supporters to flood his inbox with ideas on what his Obama Foundation should work on now that he and Michelle Obama (who tweeted a similar message about taking a quick break from the public eye sans eye-roll inducing mic check) are private citizens. He also retweeted a video from the foundation. We’re not going to update with every post-presidency Obama tweet, by the way. I’m pretty sure we’re going to write up every meme Joe Biden posts, though.
As you may have noticed, Obama will be tweeting from the @BarackObama handle, ceding @POTUS to President Donald Trump (who will, of course, continue to be active with his own personal Twitter account). You’ll have to throw Obama’s personal account a follow if you want to see what he’s up to but if you want to reminisce about his tweets from his presidency, you can do that at @POTUS44. Those tweets will be archived there and all the followers from the POTUS account moved over, leaving the original account empty after Trump was sworn in. It has, at this point, been followed by over ten million people since around noon, though.
You may have also noticed that the background for Donald Trump’s POTUS account changed from a crowd shot of the 2009 Obama inauguration to a US flag to a somewhat hazy one featuring Trump gazing out a window. Does this really matter? Not really, but it’s a reminder that while the transition is peaceful, it can, at times, be amusingly clumsy.