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The other day, around four in the morning, Donald Trump re-shared a message on Truth Social that Tom Fitton, a right-wing activist, had posted several days before. The post celebrated rumors that, as president, Trump will “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to create a “mass deportation program.” Trump’s addition to the original was: “TRUE!!!”
Trump’s post—or “re-truth,” to use the platform’s lingo—flashed a signal to journalists now entering uncharted territory, as they cover a president-elect who owns a controlling stake in a social media company. Truth Social’s parent, Trump Media & Technology Group, which went public in the spring, and trades on the market as DJT, launched its platform in 2022, after Trump’s encouragement of the Capitol insurrection prompted mainstream social media—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.—to kick him off. The venture was a way to “fight back against Big Tech,” as Trump put it. He has since been welcomed back, and his return to the White House assures him a steady stream of coverage by press outlets. Still, Trump continues to use Truth Social avidly, making it the first place he announces his cabinet picks and his preferred destination for airing political ambitions—desires, frustrations, stream-of-consciousness rants that would not quite suit a White House memorandum. As Amanda Chicago Lewis, a journalist who has reported extensively on Truth Social, told me, “He obviously prefers to communicate with people in as unmediated a way as possible.”
For the uninitiated: Truth Social bears a resemblance to Twitter. Logging on feels a bit like returning to an old neighborhood after you’ve moved away; the landmarks and buildings are the same, but the details have changed slightly. On the sign-in page, you see a spinning wheel of posts from the platform’s alternative celebrities and media sources, such as Paul Joseph Watson, a conspiracy theorist and InfoWars regular, and @catturd2, a popular right-wing troll. After creating an account, you’re given a stock profile image: a purple American eagle. The site hosts an infinite-scroll feed, a “discover” page for trending topics, a portal for direct messaging. Instead of mainstream outlets, you’ll find Newsmax, the Babylon Bee, Citizen Free Press, and the Gateway Pundit. Among the trending topics when I logged in recently were #MAGA, #GodWins, #AmericaFirst, and #ElonMusk. The platform’s tagline is “Your voice. Your freedom.”
Truth Social is “a space that is rife with grievance politics and anger and dunking and all of these other not-so-appealing aspects of the internet,” Sam Woolley, a disinformation studies scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. Trump is its namesake, its power user, and, not incidentally, its patron: the market cap is currently 6.5 billion dollars and, because Trump owns a 53 percent stake, that more than doubles his paper net worth. Lately, he’s posted at an accelerating rate—to attack enemies, defend allies, weigh in on cultural events, and, now, to announce constitutionally dubious policy. The more he posts, it seems, the better the company’s stock does. Another factor, as the Wall Street Journal reported recently: “DJT has achieved meme-stock status.” That has seemingly, despite some predictions, remained true since the election, staying above twenty-nine dollars a share—more than double its late-September value. In Truth Social’s alternate reality, Trump makes the rules.
Even so, DJT’s stock performance “belies its fundamentals,” per the Journal. In August, Trump Media reported a sixteen-million-dollar quarterly loss; before the election, trading volume was high (averaging thirty-eight million over a sixty-five-day average, according to MarketWatch), suggesting that investors were not holding on to the stock for long—just a few days. Some of the action played out on the influential meme-stock subreddit r/wallstreetbets, where, last month, an account known as 321SpinningGorilla posted a screenshot showing $38,352 invested in DJT. “YOLO my savings in DJT as a college student,” 321SpinningGorilla wrote. Some Redditors expressed encouragement, others alarm. One replied: “Thank you for your presidential donation.” Later, 321SpinningGorilla cashed out, claiming a profit.
When I examined Truth Social back in 2022, I found that just a quarter of Trump’s political allies were using the platform actively. Two years on, not much appears different. MAGA faithfuls such as Kristi Noem and Marjorie Taylor Greene have accounts, but they tend to post first on X, where they reach a larger audience. According to Similarweb, a traffic analytics firm, Truth Social has struggled to maintain users; traffic dropped 21 percent from September to October, when there were about eleven million visits worldwide. (The number of global site visits to X in October, Similarweb found, was more than four and a half billion.) If a member of a company’s leadership team plans to sell shares, as some at Trump Media have, they typically disclose their intent to do so. Trump, for his part, consistently posts about not planning to cash out, referring to any speculation to the contrary—real or imagined—as “fake, untrue, and probably illegal” rumors. Truth Social “is an important part of our historic win,” he wrote recently, “and I deeply believe in it.” That day, the share price rose.
How seriously journalists should take his 4am posts is another question. “When he became a candidate, it became a more important tool,” Tara Palmeri, senior political correspondent for Puck, told me. “Truth Social is going to remain relevant as long as Trump is around, as much as we might want to turn a blind eye to it,” Sarah Jones, senior writer covering politics for New York’s Intelligencer, said. “I do think it’s worth paying attention to and following.” Many members of the political press have already leaned in: Trump’s Fitton repost, which received no acknowledgment from his press office or on X, was written up as confirmation of his plans by the New York Times, Bloomberg, and ABC News, among others. Palmeri has signed up to receive alerts whenever Trump uses Truth Social. But like many mainstream journalists, she’s a lurker. “I don’t think that there’s a lot of appetite for the kind of reporting I do,” she said.
Jo Lukito, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she researches right-wing media ecology, foresees Truth Social as a mainstay for the next four years. Beyond that, its future could be bleak. But, she said, “once Trump’s term is over, there’s a question of who’s next. I’m curious if he’s going to shift Truth Social to become a kingmaker-esque type thing.”
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