Donald Trump launches long-heralded ‘communications platform’. It’s basically a Tumblr blog
Donald Trump made his glorified return to social media with a webpage that is basically, just a “deranged man’s Tumblr“.
Months after he was banned from Twitter and suspended from Facebook after the Capitol Riots, Trump launched his brand-new platform Tuesday (4 May) and it’s literally just a web blog. A reminder: the first blog post was in 1994.
The retro-looking DonaldJTrump.com/desk features a low-resolution picture of Trump scrawling on a book on his desk.
The platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump“, is already rammed with the Republican’s ramblings stretching as far back as 24 March. Many were posted at around midday and feature classic Trump-speak such as “2020 ELECTION FRAUD”, “Fake News Media” and calling Mitt Romney a “stone-cold loser!”
“The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” Trump wrote in one post dated 3 May, showing the extent of his dazzling wit.
The website also features a video publicly announcing the blog, which he describes as a “beacon of freedom” and a “place to speak freely” while archival footage of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and of a desktop plays in the background.
According to FoxNews, which broke news of the page, the website will allow Donald Trump to upload blog posts, comments, images and videos. Followers, meanwhile, will be limited to just sharing the posts on Facebook and Twitter – it doesn’t allow for comments.
So, while Trump can speak “freely”, his followers are stuck on mute. There are also large, brightly-coloured calls to “shop” and “contribute”.
Tacked onto the bottom of the blog is a footnote that states that it has been funded by Donald Trump’s former political action committees, Save America JFC and Make America Great.
“President Trump’s website is a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office, but this is not a new social media platform,”, Trump’s former senior advisor Jason Miller wrote in a Twitter statement.
“We’ll have additional information coming on that front in the very near future.”
But over in the world of actual social media platforms, you know, the ones Trump was banned from for inciting hate speech, users mocked Trump.
Big congrats to Donald Trump on creating [squints] a blog. pic.twitter.com/bLCtj09s8a— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) May 4, 2021
the fact that the endgame to "Trump's gonna start a cable media network" and then "Trump's gonna start a social media network" is "someone made Trump a custom WordPress that kind of looks like Twitter" is extremely fitting— jonbernhardt.bsky.social (@jonbernhardt) May 4, 2021
I don't know; it feels more like a deranged man's Tumblr to me. https://t.co/hXYhP2mRa1
— Jereme Bivins (@jcbivins) May 5, 2021
Trump's new "blog" is all about the money. It even has the recurring donation box conveniently checked for you already. pic.twitter.com/nZGNNhMTAK— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 4, 2021