(CNN) -
As the days of Trump's presidency draw to a close, the picture of how his term compares to that of his predecessors is increasingly clear.
President Donald Trump's actions in office have long been known to upset the rules of the presidency.
This ranges from his use of social media to make important announcements to his use of the power of clemency and the amount of staff turnover in his administration.
The story of the Trump presidency cannot be fully told in numbers.
Yet these figures illustrate some of the many ways that Trump and his administration challenged the executive branch status quo.
Tweets
While Barack Obama was the first US president to fully harness the power of modern social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, no American president has used social media - specifically Twitter - like Trump.
With each passing year in office, Trump tweets more and more.
He has tweeted more than 25,000 times, an average of 18 times a day, since taking office in January 2017, including retweets.
His longest break from Twitter lasted 1.9 days.
It was in June 2017, when former FBI Director James Comey was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee during the Russia investigation.
President Donald Trump has tweeted more and more frequently in the past four years.
During his first year in office, he averaged 205 tweets or retweets per month, up from 997 per month in 2020.
During his time in office, Trump has continued to use his personal cell phone with a microphone and camera to make calls.
This contravenes previous presidential security protocols and ignores warnings repeatedly made by his staff that this practice may leave him vulnerable to surveillance from abroad.
advertising
By comparison, Obama, who asked to keep his Blackberry while in office, received "a military-grade phone without a microphone, camera or location tracker that could not make or receive calls," according to
Politico
.
Trump has also largely avoided many of the formalities associated with the office's public relations.
To a large extent, he has given up press releases and individual television interviews in favor of tweets to announce sensitive issues such as cabinet changes and new policies.
And public demeanor that was largely below office prior to his tenure is often displayed online.
There, Trump frequently resorts to name calling and tweets openly racist messages and media.
On Twitter, he regularly expresses his disgust with the people he appointed.
And sometimes he uses expletives or shares tweets from users who do.
He also uses social media to spread misinformation.
As of December 17, Twitter had flagged 362 of its tweets as containing potentially misleading or disputed claims, according to Factba.se, a data analytics company.
Staff turnover
As of Dec. 15, the turnover rate among "senior advisers in the executive office of the president" was 91%, according to the Brookings Institution.
39% of these changes have taken place in jobs that have rotated two or more times since Trump took office.
Additionally, there have been 13 cabinet departures since Trump took office.
The most recent is that of Attorney General William Barr.
Source: Brookings Institution, CNN reports and analysis.
Graphic: Priya Krishnakumar, CNN.
Data collected by Brookings investigating turnover in those same "senior adviser" positions in past administrations found that among American presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan, none had a turnover rate greater than 80% in their first term. .
The same data showed that all previous presidents up to Reagan had eight or fewer cabinet casualties in their first four years in office.
Trump has had four press secretaries in the White House.
This is the largest number of press secretaries ever to serve in a single US presidential term since the position was established more than 90 years ago.
Trump has had four general secretaries.
At this point he ties with Obama as the presidents with the highest number of general secretaries during a first term.
Additionally, Trump has had seven White House communications directors.
Anthony Scaramucci, who was fired after 11 days, had the shortest term in history at that position.
Judicial appointments
Trump has been able to successfully appoint three justices to the Supreme Court.
It has also surpassed the number of federal judges appointed by George HW Bush, the most recent president who was also in office for one term.
In a single term, Trump appointed federal judges at a faster rate than any other recent president.
With the help of the Republican-controlled Senate, he has appointed more justices to the appellate courts (53) and the Supreme Court (3) than his predecessor, Barack Obama, in eight years.
No other president has been able to put more than two justices on the Supreme Court since Ronald Reagan, who served two terms.
Source: Administrative Office of the United States Courts, Federal Judicial Center.
Graphic: Christopher Hickey, CNN.
Months ago, Trump was also on track to appoint more federal appellate judges than any other recent president at the same point in the presidency, according to the Pew Research Center.
Although Trump served only four years, his changes in the composition of the federal courts will be felt long after he leaves the White House.
Trump executive actions
As of December 11, 520 presidential documents signed by Trump had been published in the Federal Register.
This includes decrees, presidential memoranda, determinations, and notifications.
Of this total, 288 are presidential decrees and memoranda (not including memoranda of an administrative nature).
President Trump accelerated the pace of his executive actions in his final year in office, in which he far exceeded the number of presidential decrees and memoranda that his predecessors issued at that point in his tenure.
Source: Federal Register.
Graphic: Janie Boschma, CNN.
Presidents have increasingly used presidential decrees and memoranda interchangeably to issue directives to their agencies.
Both are legally binding, although the president who takes office the next term can reverse the executive actions.
The greatest reliance on such actions has occurred at a time when Congress, increasingly stagnant, has made it difficult for presidents to advance their agendas.
Obama had issued 226 decrees and memoranda at this point in his tenure, while George W. Bush had signed 189.
Before becoming president, Trump complained about what he considered an abuse of executive authority by Obama.
However, he also suggested that the government could be run like a business.
"The country was not built on decrees," Trump said in February 2016. "Right now, Obama is going around signing decrees.
He can't even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all those bills.
It is a basic disaster.
You can't do that, "he said.
Yet Trump has already surpassed both George W. Bush and Obama in the number of decrees and memoranda issued.
Initially, Trump framed his presidency as one that was to be run as a company.
"If we could run our country the way I have run my company, we would have a country that you would be very proud of," he said during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016.
However, in the months after he came to power, Trump lamented that politics was "a very rough system" and "an archaic system."
And in an interview about his first 100 days in office with Reuters, Trump said: “This is more work than (I did) in my previous life.
I thought it would be easier.
Cases and deaths from coronavirus
Trump's final year in office has been largely defined by his administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The United States has 4% of the world's population, but in mid-December it has 23% of the world's coronavirus cases and 19% of deaths.
Source: US Census Bureau, Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Graphic: Curt Merrill and Christopher Hickey, CNN.
As of December 17, there had been more than 300,000 coronavirus deaths and 17 million cases in the United States.
The time Trump spent playing golf
Since taking office, the president has made 418 visits to Trump-branded properties.
This includes 307 days spent at golf clubs, according to CNN's tally based on media reports and agendas and public appearances through Dec. 17.
That means Trump has visited golf courses on about 21% of the days of his presidency, or about 1 out of every 5 days.
He has visited Trump properties on about 29% of the days of his presidency, almost a third of his days in office.
Trump has spent an average of 77 days a year playing golf and an average of 105 days at Trump-branded properties, according to CNN's tally.
Source: CNN's count of media reports, agenda, and public appearances.
Graphic: Priya Krishnakumar, CNN.
Since the first coronavirus case was identified in the United States, Trump has spent 48 days at golf clubs and made 77 visits to Trump-branded properties.
Before becoming president, Trump often complained about then-President Obama's golf habit.
In 2015 he said that "I may play more golf than any human being in America."
"And I'm not sure that's good for the president," he said.
Yet Trump spent 307 days on the golf courses in one term, compared to Obama's 333 rounds of golf in two terms, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who maintains detailed statistics on the presidencies.
Executions
The federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988 and expanded in 1994. Between 1988 and 2003, when a moratorium was imposed, all under George W. Bush.
The 10 executions ordered under Trump so far are the most federal executions under any president since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By the time he leaves office, Trump will have ordered nearly as many federal executions in six months as there were 14 executions during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's three terms. By the time he leaves office, Trump will have ordered nearly as many federal executions in six months as there were the 14 executions that President Franklin D. Roosevelt oversaw during his three terms through 1945.
Annotation: The Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional in 1972. There were only three federal executions between when the death penalty was reinstated in 1988 and the imposition of a moratorium in 2003. The first federal execution under Trump took place on July 14, 2020.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Graphic: Christopher Hickey, CNN.
Barr, Trump's outgoing Attorney General, resumed federal executions in July 2019 after the 17-year hiatus.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the last time that so many executions were scheduled for the period between an election and the inauguration of a new president was when Grover Cleveland ruled.
Accusations
Trump is not the first president to have people close to him plead guilty to crimes.
However, he is the first president in decades with as many friends as partners with possible jail time.
Nine of Trump's friends and associates have been charged or found guilty of crimes.
That's more than the numbers for the past four presidents combined, but less than a third of those charged in Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon circles.
Source: Congressional Research Service reports, Government Publications Office and Government Accountability Office reports, Department of Justice, court records, CNN and other reports, presidential libraries and government archives.
Graphic: Christopher Hickey, Janette Gagnon and Amy Roberts, CNN.
CNN's tally of people charged or convicted of crimes at Richard Nixon's command, for example, includes many of the people involved in the Watergate scandal, such as Nixon's secretary general and the five men involved in the robbery. from the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
And those charged or convicted of crimes in the Ronald Reagan environment include a host of partners involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and partners charged in connection with the mismanagement of the Department of Housing and Urban Development by then-Secretary Samuel. Pierce.
Trump's pardons and commutations
Other presidents were criticized for their use of the power of clemency for what appeared to be political ends.
Yet Trump's acts of clemency have taken that selfish use of power to new extremes.
Many of Trump's pardons and commutations have been for former associates, conservative political figures and well-connected people.
All but five of the people who received a pardon from Trump have connections to the White House or influence on its political base or, in the case of the posthumous pardon of Susan B. Anthony, serve as a political symbol (even though he carried the sentence with pride and historians say he would not have wanted the pardon).
Source: Department of Justice.
Graphic: Christopher Hickey, CNN.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has highlighted his enactment of the First Step Act, a far-reaching criminal justice law that resulted in the release of thousands of federal prisoners.
But his record of pardons and commutations only reinforces the evidence that he does not strive to correct past mistakes based on the systemic biases of the criminal justice system, with a few notable exceptions.
One of Trump's first commutations was that of Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for money laundering and a non-violent drug-related crime.
However, as with many other people Trump intervened for, Johnson's name was seriously considered only after a person connected to the White House - namely, Kim Kardashian West - was contacted.
So far, the number of people Trump pardoned or had their sentences commuted is far fewer than the clemency of former US presidents going back to Nixon.
Jimmy Carter, who served a single term as Trump, granted 534 pardons.
Obama commuted 1,715 prison sentences in his two terms, the most of any president in history, and specifically explained his intention to highlight the systemic bias in the criminal justice system.
Many modern presidents have waited until the last days of their presidencies to issue acts of clemency.
And CNN recently reported that Trump, in his final months in office, is considering preventive pardons for more associates, his family members, and possibly himself.
A source also told CNN earlier this month that he expects a "barrage" of additional pardons before Trump leaves office.
CNN's Betsy Klein and Christina Carrega contributed to this report.