Trump’s online platform in trouble as legal woes mount

THE viability of Donald Trump’s social media platform has been called into question amid fears the former president’s legal woes and a decline in his popularity will damage its business.

Truth Social, a platform closely resembling Twitter, which banned Mr Trump after the Capitol siege, still has no guaranteed source of revenue six months after its high-profile launch and may never be profitable, according to Digital World Acquisition, the company that planned to take it public.

As Mr Trump’s legal woes mounted with an FBI raid of his Florida home, Digital World Acquisition sought approval to delay the planned merger, on Sept 8, amid fears the 76-year-old could be mired in “further controversies that damage his credibility”.

The company noted in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the reputation and popularity of Mr Trump, 76, “will be important factors to its success”.

Digital World Acquisition’s stock price has plunged nearly 75 per cent since March and it has lost $6.5million (£5.5 million) in the first half of the year.

Republican outrage over the FBI’S search for classified documents stored at Mr Trump’s Mar-a-lago estate fuelled a hive of activity on Truth Social, with the former president using the site as his primary mouthpiece to claim the investigation was politically motivated.

But the site’s data shows just a few thousand people posting on the platform in recent days, according to The Washington Post.

It is just the latest setback for Truth Social, which was dealt another blow this week when its trademark application was rejected for being “confusingly similar” to others, including social media app Vero – True Social.

It emerged earlier this year that Truth Social’s planned merger with Digital World Acquisition was under federal investigation.

The platform’s seeming financial woes were further underscored when one of its largest vendors reportedly claimed last week it had failed to receive more than $1million in contractually obligated payments.

The Trump company allegedly stopped paying Rightforge, a conservative web-hosting service, in March and is now said to owe around $1.6million for setting up Truth Social’s webservicing infrastructure, according to Fox Business.

Neither Rightforge nor Truth Social denied the dispute when contacted by Fox Business.

A spokesman for Mr Trump had no comment.