The social-media king plots a return
Donald Trump vowed vengeance when he was banned from Twitter last year. What will that look like?
When Donald Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook in the wake of the Capitol riots last year, he vowed to wreck “vengeance”, say Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng for The Daily
Beast. That took the form of launching a social-media network of his own, Truth
Social, which attracted
“big money and significant partnerships”. His dreams of becoming a “MAGA
Mark Zuckerberg” have, however, been frustrated.
The rollout of the new site in February was “lacklustre”, and glitches prevented many fans from joining. Interest has now evaporated, with downloads of the app falling from a peak of 170,000 downloads a day to just 8,000 now, making it only “the 355th most-popular app on Apple devices”.
It’s not, of course, the first time that a Trump venture has failed to live up to expectations, says Bess Levin in Vanity Fair. Before the former US president made his fortune “playing the part of a successful businessman on TV, where he was able to convince millions of people he actually knew what he was doing”, he had “a long list of business failures under his belt”, including Trump Steaks, Trump Shuttle, Trump Mortgage and Trump Taj Mahal. Still, most of these “crashed and burned before the rise of social media”, and social media is one of the few things he was supposed to be good at, so this one “has got to hurt”.
Even a failed social network brings some perks though, say Drew Harwell and Josh Dawsey in The Washington Post. Trump could, for example, tap into the phone numbers and email addresses of a vast assortment of potential donors and voters, something that could come in handy if he were to run for president again. And if the US regulator approves the merger of Truth Social with Trump’s special-purpose acquisition company, or Spac, Digital World Acquisition, the social-media site could gain access to more than $1bn that investors have committed to the Spac since the company’s “grand ambitions” were announced late last year.
Yearning for Twitter
Even if Truth Social does indeed turn out be a “sinking ship”, there’s no reason why its founder will necessarily go down with it, says Chris Cillizza on Newsweek. It might be hard for him to “just walk away”, given his promises that the site would “fundamentally revolutionise the way conservatives communicate with one another”, but then again his record shows he “is not a man unwilling to contradict himself or go back on what he’s said in the past”. And for all his bragging about Truth Social, Trump “clearly misses Twitter – badly”. He would “leap at the chance to get back on the social-media site – and regain his 88 million followers – as he has struggled to replicate the influence he had via the platform and “knows how essential Twitter has been to building and maintaining his persona”. Even his “lifetime ban” from the platform may not be an absolute bar – many Republicans are now pressuring Elon Musk, who recently became Twitter’s largest shareholder and nearly joined the board, to reinstate him.
“Trump’s socialmedia site could gain access to more than $1bn that investors have committed to his Spac”