For a moment, Trump is getting just a little quieter
Former President Donald Trump is suddenly, and uncharacteristically, silent.
A highlight of his website, the “From the desk of Donald J. Trump” through which he’s recently offered his thoughts on a variety of people and issues, is now gone. Launched May 4, it lasted less than a month.
CNBC, which first reported the departure of Trump’s blog, said the former president’s senior aide Jason Miller said it “will not be returning.”
“It was just auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on,” Miller told CNBC via email.
By all accounts, the Trump blog was a flop.
The Washington Post reported last month that during one week in May, the heavily promoted “From the desk of ” feature was “shared to Facebook on average fewer than 2,000 times a day — a staggering drop from last year, when his Facebook page fielded tens of millions of comments, shares and other interactions every week, according to data” from social media analytics firms.
Citing different data, NBC News reported last month that Trump’s blog “has drawn a considerably smaller audience than his once-powerful social media accounts.”
The offerings often sounded like the things Trump used to write on Twitter, before he was banned from the social media platform two days after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Twitter said Trump could no longer post because it carried “the risk of further incitement of violence.” He’s also, for the time being, been removed from Facebook.
The now-gone statements on Trump’s website included endorsements of some political figures and repetition of the false narrative that widespread voter fraud was the reason President Joe Biden won the presidential election.
Last month, for example, Trump complained about “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020,” which he said was “corrupt” and “the greatest Fraud in the history of our Country!” There is no evidence to support those claims.
On Monday, New York Times Trump reporter Maggie Haberman reported that the former president “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated [as president] by August” even though there is no mechanism by which that can happen.
The absence of Trump’s state
ments comes shortly after he relocated to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club for the summer. His Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach closes during the steamy summer months.