It was the yugest blog in history: hotter than Donald Trump’s steaks, more magnanimous than the Trump Foundation charities, and even better attended than the former president’s inauguration. Now, it is no more. Less than a month after launching From the Desk of Donald Trump with a promise to “redefine the game,” 45 has shut down his blog and moved on.
After most social media platforms banned Trump following the January 6th Capitol insurrection, his aides canvassed Fox News with a sales pitch. The blog would be “the hottest ticket” in social media, according to senior adviser Jason Miller, drawing “tens of millions of people” inside of three months. “It’s going to completely redefine the game,” he said, “And everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does.”
But “everybody” did no such thing. According to a Washington Post analysis, Trump’s website “attracted fewer estimated visitors than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish.”
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Besides that, the blog posts were supposed to help skirt social media bans, encouraging his followers to share Trump’s musings even while Trump himself couldn’t post. But they were only shared on Facebook about 2,000 times a day, a far cry from last year when his page enjoyed tens of millions of interactions each week. Overall social engagement across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest was down an estimated 95% since January. Now, the old link for From the Desk of Donald Trump redirects to a sign-up page for alerts.
Still, the 2024 campaign is only a few years away, and Trump seems determined to reconnect with his old audience. On June 2nd on Twitter, a former chair of the Nevada GOP pondered if this was the “precursor to him joining another social media platform?” His adviser Miller responded, “Yes, actually, it is. Stay tuned!”
There’s no telling how the political landscape will change between now and the 2022 midterms, let alone the 2024 presidential election. But Trump spent quite a bit of energy in office railing against Jeff Bezos, and he’s no doubt feeling a bit nervous now; after Amazon’s $8.45 billion acquisition of MGM, the fabled racist The Apprentice tapes are owned by his old antagonist.
Yes, actually, it is. Stay tuned! https://t.co/USKGvVXe2f
— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) June 2, 2021
