7 memorable times Trump wielded his trademark Sharpie

The former president displayed a penchant for using the distinctive black marker on documents throughout his first presidency. The bold strokes can be seen on anything from executive orders to speech drafts to allegedly altered hurricane maps.

Trump loved to use a Sharpie so much that he even reached out to the stationary company to design a custom pen for him to sign documents, emblazoned with his mountain-peak-like signature.

In a four-part HBO series done in partnership with Axios in 2018, he made no secret of his love for a Sharpie pen — and how much he hated using government-ordered writing utensils traditionally used by presidents.

"I was signing documents with a very expensive pen and it didn't write well," Trump said, referring to the government pen. "It was a horrible pen, and it was extremely expensive."

He added: "And then I started using just a Sharpie, and I said to myself, 'Well wait a minute, this writes much better and this cost almost nothing.'"

The Trump Organization — but not Trump himself or his children — in 2022 faced charges of criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records, and filing false tax returns in a scheme to defraud the state.

After the trial kicked off, documents from the Trump Organization were presented to jurors by the trial's first witness, Jeffrey McConney, the company's longtime controller.

McConney identified the signatures — in distinctive bold Sharpie — on some half-dozen documents, which included important letters and payroll documents, as that of the former president.

In a May 1, 2005 letter detailing an overhead projection, Trump personally authorized a $6,500-a-month lease for a Manhattan apartment to be lived in exclusively by his longtime chief financial officer.

"In other words, Donald J. Trump authorized Donald J. Trump to sign the lease" for the apartment, Joshua Steinglass, one of the two lead prosecutors, said during the trial.

Trump's notes were clearly visible to cameras — aided by his tendency to hold them up to the crowd for emphasis.

At a campaign rally in Virginia in 2016, Trump touted national polling numbers and talked about Jeff Sessions, who was an early supporter of Trump's presidential campaign in 2016.

Trump also mentioned Ashley Guindon, a Virginia police officer who was killed on her first day on the job, and he vowed to "restore law and order [and] respect [for] the men and women who protect," per his notes.

In a press conference ahead of declaring a state of emergency amid the spread of COVID-19 in March 2020, Trump briefed the nation on the distribution of ventilators and respirators ahead of the rapidly spreading respiratory disease that was then shrouded in mystery.

In his notes, the president jotted down to mention how "good govs are getting it done, bad ones are not."

"We're really backing up the governors. The governors have to go out and do their things and you have a lot of governors, they've done a fantastic job," Trump said during the press conference on March 22, 2020. "You have some that haven't. Usually, it's the ones that complain that have the problems."

He added: "But we've had a great relationship as an example with Governor Cuomo, with Governor Newsom," noting them specifically due to the "hotbeds" of infection that were transpiring in their states respectively.

One of the platforms that Trump infamously campaigned on for his first presidential campaign was building a wall at the border, which eventually came to fruition — though not to completion — during his first administration.

In September 2019, he paid a visit to a border wall construction in Otay Mesa, a neighborhood in San Diego County, California. With a hefty price tag of $147 million, the 14-mile section of steel beams, concrete, and rebar replaced the construction of a decades-old wall that was previously installed in the 1990s.

"You can fry an egg on that wall," Trump told the reporters and officials gathered during his visit, referring to the wall's design to absorb heat.

And without fail, the president brought out a Sharpie to sign one of the slats of his beloved border wall, which he said was at the request of the border patrol agents at the site.

"I autographed one of the bollards," he said. "There are a lot of bollards. That's a lot of bollards."

In September 2019, ahead of the devastation brought in by Hurricane Dorian, the president said the storm was headed to Alabama.

"In addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated," Trump tweeted at the time. "Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already category 5. BE CAREFUL! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!"

In a bid to quell public panic regarding the former president's errant forecast, the Birmingham branch of the National Weather Service set the record straight, blatantly correcting his prediction.

"Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian," the agency said in a tweet the same day. "We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east."

But Trump doubled down once again on his claims and refused to accept the NWS' forecast, instead presenting a map of Hurricane Dorian's path with a black Sharpie stroke extending the storm's path over Alabama. The incident later became known as "SharpieGate," prompting its fair share of internet mockery and memes in its wake.

During Trump's first impeachment inquiry, Gordon Sondland, former US Ambassador to the European Union, delivered damning testimony publicly confirming the quid pro quo request from Trump to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The articles of impeachment were related, in part, to Trump's reported efforts to strong-arm Zelensky into launching politically motivated investigations against the Bidens ahead of the 2020 election and withholding vital military aid while doing so.

But like Trump's persistent spoken words in denying the accusations of quid pro quo, his written ones echoed the same denial, as written in bold Sharpie on Air Force One stationary in 2019.

"I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo," he wrote. "Tell Zelensky to do the right thing. This is the final word from the pres of the US."

And, of course, the note had its heyday on the internet as people turned it into Eminem jokes, Pearl Jam setlist jokes, and lyrics of a Morrissey song.

On the first day of his second administration, Trump showed the world his love for Sharpie pens persists.

He signed a flurry of executive orders to usher in his second non-consecutive term in the White House, including a freeze on federal hiring, a return-to-office mandate for federal workers, and an order to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord — each bearing his name in thick Sharpie strokes.

The president's supporters appear to share his penchant for the black permanent marker, with one fan in the inaugural audience calling for Trump to toss him a pen after signing an order with it. Trump did, throwing each Sharpie he used to sign the orders into the crowd.