Trump and his aggressive capital-lettered ramblings had been absent from social media for more than a year when he launched Truth Social. On January 8, 2021, he was banned from Twitter, then still run by Jack Dorsey, for contravening the company’s “glorification of violence” policy. The president had been very mean about Mike Pence and hadn’t exactly discouraged his followers from storming the US Capitol two days before.
But @realDonaldTrump had nearly 89 million followers and, unsurprisingly in the months after handing the keys of the White House to Joe Biden, several conservative social media companies begged him to sign up to their rival platforms.
His campaign aide Jason Miller had become chief executive of Gettr and went to visit Trump at his golf club in New Jersey, bearing a smartphone containing a mock-up of how Trump’s posts would appear on the app. “He loved it,” Miller says. “He was kind of holding the phone in his hand and he was, like, ‘I haven’t done this in a while.’ ”In his book Landslide, the writer Michael Wolff claims that another platform, Parler, had agreed to give Trump 40 per cent of gross revenues if he became an active member. The only sticking point? Trump demanded that the free-speech platform bar anyone who posted negative things about him.
For many, social media seemed too quiet, less consequential without Trump. Many others enjoyed the peace. But it also meant, for the first time since Trump joined Twitter in 2009, we had no idea what the former president was thinking. In the end Trump decided to tweet to the converted and launched his own micro-blogging site in February 2022.
Truth Social looks almost exactly like Twitter, but with red check marks instead of blue. It would set itself against the big tech companies, Trump declared. It would not go around “labelling alternative views as disinformation”. The dream, investors were told, was to build “a non-cancellable global community”. Instead of tweeting, users on this new platform would “truth”. Truth was now a verb. You could “retruth” the “truths” of other “truthers”.
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Seven million people have downloaded the app; about 400,000 of whom were actively using the site in January, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. By comparison TikTok had 1.1 billion active users last month and Instagram had 1.5 billion. Twitter — bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion in October 2022, and now called X — had 355 million. Musk allowed Trump back on X in November 2022; he has posted just once since then, two and half years after his final “tweet”, sharing the mugshot he posed for in a grimy jail in Georgia, with a moan about election interference and a plug for his own website.
Truth Social is still a small pond, with one large orange fish. If you haven’t signed up, here’s what, in the run-up to the election, he — and his followers — are up to. Can all Trump’s truths add up to a second term in the White House?
Trump’s first post on Truth Social featured a call-back worthy of a Netflix stand-up special, a reference to his glory days on Twitter when Americans awoke each morning to a cascade of announcements and diatribes that their president had posted in the early hours, assailing the Oscars, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or threatening nuclear war with North Korea. Or, as he famously posted at 12.06am on May 31, 2017: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” (A mistyping of “coverage” is the most convincing theory.)
The accompanying photograph showed Trump on the croquet lawn of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida golf resort, with those allegedly small fingers tapping away once more. The ALL CAPS and exclamation marks!!! were very much back.
Of the seven million people who have downloaded Truth Social, 6.6 million follow Trump. It’s not really a public square; it’s more like the mezzanine of Trump Tower: open to the public, but it’s his place. On Twitter, Trump’s posts were followed by endless replies from prominent liberals and “never Trump” Republicans; on Truth Social, each “truth” triggers a chorus of supportive comments and memes. And seemingly earnest comparisons to Jesus — which Trump has been happy to exploit.
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When Trump began truthing in February 2022, he was even more unfettered than on Twitter. He shared familiar conspiracy theories, including the repeated claim that the 2020 election was stolen, a fraud so great, he claimed, that it allowed “for the termination of all rules” in the constitution.
In this election year Trump faces the small matter of 91 felony charges, in state and federal courts, along with a $370 million fraud suit in New York. Separately, the Supreme Court is mulling whether Trump should be allowed to run for president at all.
On the first day of the civil fraud trial in Manhattan last October, Trump retruthed an image of himself in the dock with Jesus at his side, possibly as a co-defendant. This is Trump as a man of sorrows, persecuted while fighting for what is right and godly.
“In the end, they’re not coming after me,” he said last June, after he was indicted on federal charges in Florida. “They’re coming after you — I’m just standing in their way.” If he wasn’t being targeted by the “swamp”, he seemed to say, it could easily be one of his innocent supporters falsely accused of inflating their assets while negotiating tens of millions of dollars in loans from the private wealth division of Deutsche Bank.
Among the millions of Trump ultras on Truth Social, every now and then a liberal “truther” pops up. Gavin Newsom, the Democrat governor of California, has been on Truth Social since 2022 and recently said he likes to relax of an evening by going onto the platform to fight its inhabitants.
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Figuring it’s better to be inside the tent aiming outwards, the Biden campaign opened an account in October. Recent activity on the account has focused on reposting videos of Nikki Haley, Trump’s last rival for the Republican nomination, slagging off the former president and quoting this pithy zinger from the director of the National Economic Council: “The overall picture looks good. Inflation has come down a lot while employment and growth have remained strong.”
Truth Social is where Trump can appeal to his base with less fear of being hauled over the coals by The New York Times, whose opinion he definitely doesn’t care about. More migrants illegally crossed America’s southern border in December than in any month on record and cities all over the country are struggling to cope with the arrivals: it will be a key issue in 2024. Trump’s rhetoric around the issue has turned dark. In December he told a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants from Africa and Asia were “poisoning the blood of our country”, repeating the claim in this truth later that evening. The Biden campaign pointed out he was parroting Hitler and claimed that he was running “on a promise to rule as a dictator”. “I never knew that Hitler said it,” Trump later said.
On Fox News in early December the host Sean Hannity offered Trump the chance to reassure Americans he would not rule as a dictator. Trump replied, somewhat menacingly: “Except for day one.”
Weeks later a poll of 1,000 likely voters commissioned by the Daily Mail suggested the word they most associated with a second Trump presidency was “revenge”, followed by “power” and “dictatorship”. The results were presented in an ominous word cloud, which you might think looked like bad PR for a presidential hopeful. Trump shared the graphic on Boxing Day.
In less controversial news for Trump, that word cloud also featured “economy” in big letters. Many Americans, struggling with higher inflation and interest rate rises, recall the Trump years before the pandemic as a period of relative prosperity. Unexpectedly good economic news in recent months — inflation-adjusted GDP growth of 3.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2023, outpacing every other advanced economy including China; 3.1 million jobs added last year; wage-growth exceeding inflation — has made Americans feel slightly better about the economy, but only slightly, and Trump has been concerned to make sure that they do not feel too good about it. The economy is still terrible, he insisted in a truth as 2023 drew to a close.
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An economic crash, predicted by some economists last year, would probably be helpful for his campaign and Trump has taken the unorthodox approach, for a candidate, of openly saying he rather hopes there will be one before the election. As the stock market neared a record high last month, Trump declared that he should be given credit for this too.
Here’s another Twitter tradition that persists on the new platform: Trump’s custom of using a new year’s greeting to taunt all his foes. There were, this last Christmas, a few lighter posts in which Trump sounded like a man home again after weeks on the campaign trail and not quite sure what to do with himself. One truth linked to an article arguing that he really ought to have been named person of the year by Time magazine. There was also a lengthy truth at the expense of the director of Home Alone 2 over an interview he had given years ago saying that Trump had “bullied his way” into a cameo role in the 1992 film. “I was very busy and didn’t want to do it,” Trump wrote.
In a later truth he warned his followers against investing in diamonds, on account of improvements in lab-grown gemstones (“Even experts can’t tell the difference. Be careful!!!”).
But as 2024 approached, he seemed to regain his embittered mojo, sharing his conspiracies about election rigging and the Great Replacement — the idea that has gained broad credence among his base of supporters that Democrats are bringing in immigrants more disposed to vote for them. A special “salutation” was of course reserved for Joe Biden.
If endorsement from Jesus wasn’t potent enough, how about going all the way to the top? Last month Trump shared a video by a collective called Dilley Meme Team, in which a baritone voice — an AI recreation of a popular conservative radio host called Paul Harvey, who died in 2009 — announces: “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state. So God made Trump. I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle the deep state, and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.”
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Besides posting it on Truth Social, Trump played it before taking the stage at a series of weekend rallies in Iowa. “It was very concerning,” Joseph Brown, the pastor of Marion Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, Iowa, who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, told The New York Times. “There is only one God, and it’s not Trump or any other man.”
In another Dilley Meme Team video a different narrator with a familiar drawl declares that “when it comes time to cast your vote remember this old cowboy’s advice” and vote for Donald Trump. The voice was an AI version of John Wayne, who died in 1979.
The Republican race for the nomination is now down to two, and no one is quite sure how long the other one, Nikki Haley, will hang on. Trump has turned all his firepower on her on Truth Social, calling her “bird brain” and peddling the false suggestion that she is not eligible to be president as her parents were born in India (they were). He began calling her Nimbra or Nimrada, a reference to her first name, which is Nimarata.
Then he levelled what could hardly be a more grievous insult in the eyes of Trump followers: he posted a picture that blended Haley’s face with that of Hillary Clinton. Soon after, Trump gave a speech in Concord, New Hampshire, in which he mixed up Haley with the Democrat and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as if all his female political opponents were steadily blending in his mind intoa single hated figure.
In mid-January Donald Trump was flitting between the campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire and a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan where he was accused in a civil case of defaming the writer E Jean Carroll by denying that he had raped her. In an earlier trial the court awarded Carroll $5 million in damages, including for defamation for an untrue “truth” Trump had posted on Truth Social in October 2022.
No cameras or phones were allowed in the courtroom, so it was tricky for Trump’s supporters to follow along. But while he was in court dozens of apparently prepared statements were posted on Truth Social, offering Trump’s version of events and disputing various items of evidence and court procedures.
In the second Carroll trial the free-wheeling philosophy of Truth Social collided with the rules of a federal court. Trump’s attorney sought to argue that when he defamed Carroll, calling her a liar, he was exercising his right to free speech. “All he did was tell his truth,” she said. “It is an American right.”
The jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million, including $65 million in punitive damages. Trump, as you can read, “fully” disagreed.
Trump doesn’t leave much to the imagination with his foreign-policy pronouncements on Truth Social. In a February 10 post, he called for a ban on all US foreign aid unless it’s a loan. At a rally in South Carolina he reasoned Ukraine could one day “drop us like a dog, like a female drops a male after a date because he doesn’t like her”. It was time, he told the rally, for Nato countries to pay their fair share, or he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want”. Surely even Trump would take that statement back? See his next truth below.
Some accuse the former president of wanting to take America back to the Dark Ages, but look how on top of the latest technology he is. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this from a man who owns his own social media platform. Here he is accusing artificial intelligence of the gross crime of … making him look fat. We’ll leave it up to you who you trust. It’s perhaps a niche thing to get exercised about when the following was due to happen that same day …
Trump did not, you can see, agree with a New York judge’s ruling that he had fraudulently exaggerated his wealth, and just 81 minutes after truthing about golf, he let Truth Social know about it. More did indeed follow. He is appealing the ruling.
In July 2019, when President Trump posted a diatribe on Twitter against congressman Elijah Cummings and his home city of Baltimore, the Democratic strategist David Axelrod prophesied that this was the sort of thing that could cause Trump to lose the 2020 election.
Some Democrats now argue that Trump’s higher poll numbers are partly down to the fact that, after his Twitter ban, he largely disappeared from public life and people forgot what it was like to wake up to the man in full cry on social media. Trump is now back, truthing dozens of times a day but the fact that his audience is much smaller could yet prove helpful for his campaign. He can speak directly to his base without popping into the feeds of the independent voters he will need in November and who are more likely to vote for him if they can’t read what he writes.
Meanwhile, with each advance towards the White House, the value of his social media platform rises. You can’t invest directly in Truth Social; instead there’s a special-purpose acquisition company called Digital World that will eventually merge with Trump Media & Technology Group to take it public. Digital World’s share price shot up after Trump won the Iowa caucuses last month; it rose 88 per cent the day Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race for Republican nomination and endorsed him.
If Trump becomes president again, as is entirely possible, suddenly this little platform of his will be the primary communications channel for the leader of the free world. Downloads will go through the roof. Trump owns 90 per cent of the stock. He could make billions.
Jesus, John Wayne, Elvis Presley — these are the cultural references on Truth Social. Does Trump look like Elvis? Some of his followers replied politely to say that yes, indeed he does. It is certainly true that lots of people who heard he was dead, politically speaking, now believe that he is very much alive, and quite likely to return to the stage for an encore. Thank you very much.
