RIP Donald Trump's Stupid Blog
After getting de-platformed by Twitter and Facebook in the aftermath of the January 6th Kerfuffle, Donald Trump had a problem. How was he going to rile up the base and antagonize enemies now that he’d been tardily booted off his social media platforms of choice?
How were Trump cultists supposed to know which government building or institution he wanted them to righteously attack on his behalf unless he clearly delineated so on Twitter or Facebook? What if we all assumed Trump wanted us to descend upon the Senate and fuck shit up in pursuit of electoral integrity but he actually had the pentagon in mind? Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?!?
So Trump’s people decided to forego the overtures of right-wing Twitter competitors like Parler or Gab, at least in the short term, in favor of bypassing the LAME-stream media and getting the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president’s pudding-headed ideas and muddled thoughts to the public directly via a blog on his website.
The idea was to give Trump a place where he could drop truth bombs about his favorite subjects (how he actually won the 2020 election, how he actually won the 2020 election and last but not least how he actually won the 2020 election) without having to worry about being censored, banned, deleted or fact-checked into oblivion.
Trump could give it to his people as raw as an early Ol Dirty Bastard demo and twice as nasty. And all he needed to do was accept an ever-so-slight existential downgrade from “most powerful and famous man in the world” to “seventy-four year-old beginner blogger.”
I’ve come to love the challenge of writing a more or less daily blog. But in order to embrace being a blogger I had to get over a certain snobbishness regarding the form. And I was just a pop culture writer, not the President of the United States or the star of the most popular show on television.
The problem was that Trump had nothing to say. Twitter was consequently the perfect medium because its space constraints, particularly when users were limited to 140 characters or under, made saying anything of substance damn near impossible.
Even with innovations like threads, the nature, technology and culture of Twitter made it difficult, if not impossible, to mount substantive arguments or express complicated thoughts.
That suited Trump just fine because he had no interest in substantive arguments or complicated thoughts. He figured out early on that he could win Twitter not with pithy one-liners or acidic observations but rather blunt, repetitive rhetoric bashing away at the same points over and over and over and over.
Trump knew that all he had to do to whip the base into a frenzy was repeat the same ideas endlessly, with minor variations. Even more excitingly for Trump, he could whip his critics into a frenzy with the same toxic catch-phrases.
Trump NEEDED the oxygen and engagement of Twitter. He needed to be constantly reminded of the slavish devotion of his fans and the white-hot burning hatred of his enemies. More than anything, he needed to be the center of attention.
Blogging in the wilderness of post-election took all that away from him. Without the re-tweets and effusive ass-kissing of his fans and anger of his enemies, he was reduced to being just another semi-literate conspiracy theorist yelling at the people in power about how much better everything would be if he were running the show.
Without Twitter or Facebook or the presidency, Trump’s online existence seems small and sad and insignificant. As his The Art of the Deal ghost-writer Tony Schwartz has famously confessed, Trump barely knows how to read and has no interest in actual writing, as opposed to slapping his name on books written by others as haphazardly slaps his name on buildings around the world for a fee.
So even a form as casual, un-demanding and short form as blogging was too involved and demanding for Trump’s child-like intellect and non-existent attention span.
About a month after being launched, Donald Trump’s blog has been shut down, a victim of disinterest on both Trump and the public’s part. Trump and blogging were a bad fit from the start and now his blog can join Trump Airlines, Trump University, Trump: The Game, Trump magazine, Trump Vodka and Trump steaks as high-profile failures that have somehow not affected Trump’s conception of himself as the ultimate winner.
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