Trump has entered a disturbing new era in his Truth Social obsession
A new Washington Post analysis concludes that as of Sunday, President Donald Trump had posted '2,262 times to his company's social network Truth Social in the 132 days since his inauguration ... more than three times the number of tweets he sent during the same period of his first presidency.' Trump is reportedly surprising his staff with outlandish posts fired off in the late hours of the night and early hours of the morning, sharing unfiltered thoughts that then ricochet across the internet.
In other words, America's president is subjecting himself to unprecedented levels of internet brain rot. As Trump pursues his second-term policy regime — which is both more extreme and more erratic than his first — he is more online than ever, and it's not good for anyone.
Long before his political career took off, Trump was an inveterate poster. He was a power user of Twitter, commenting on everything from the actor Robert Pattinson's love life to the musician Miley Cyrus' outfits. Then, during his first presidential race and term in the White House, he used Twitter to dominate the national conversation, advance political talking points and pick on his political adversaries. It was dizzying to watch a president fire off typo-laden, market-moving, potentially nuclear war-sparking posts at odd hours of the day and night.
But Trump appears to have entered a categorically new era in his posting in his second term in office. It's not just that he's posting a lot more; it's also about where he's doing it.
Trump is publishing his stream-of-consciousness statements primarily on his own social media platform, Truth Social, in which he owns billions of dollars' worth of shares. Incessantly posting pushes the public and the media to join the platform to keep abreast of the president's announcements, boosting the company's value and enriching him. He has an incentive to post for the sake of posting, to maintain a constant buzz around his platform and keep his media business in the news and at the center of the culture.
But Truth Social is also a completely different informational ecosystem for Trump than Twitter was during his first term. It is almost entirely populated by MAGA diehards, and Trump's posts are met with near-universal support and celebration. On Truth Social, Trump sits upon a digital throne, sharing a relentless stream of content with a friendly activist-type set rather than the more politically diverse demographics that made up Twitter. That could affect how Trump perceives the political world: Seeking consistent validation from the online MAGA base, cleaved from the rest of the online world, helps incentivize extra adversarial and conspiratorial commentary.
While Trump shared any number of disturbing posts on Twitter during his first term — reposting antisemitic memes, 'jokes' about attacking the media and winks at QAnon conspiracy theorists — some of his most recent posts have garnered more widespread attention for their uniquely strange content. Consider, for example, how over the weekend Trump reposted a post on Truth Social that claimed that former President Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced by clones and 'robotic engineered soulless mindless entities.'
As my colleague Steve Benen pointed out, Trump has been on a tear of posts recently that combine the weird with the authoritarian at breathtaking levels:
Just in recent weeks, the current president has used his social media platform to amplify all kinds of truly bizarre claims and arguments, ranging from targeting Barack Obama with a military tribunal, accusing federal judges of committing acts 'tantamount to treason and sedition,' to suggestions that Trump should be chosen to serve as the pope.
Trump's intensifying obsession with posting on social media is a natural expression of his presidency: impulsive, reckless, self-promotional and filled with misinformation. It is common to counsel the terminally online to 'log off and touch grass.' But in this case it seems useless — the posting is the point.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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