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No political leader has used social media quite like Donald Trump. But his recent posts on Truth Social, the social media platform he founded in 2021, have become increasingly bizarre: the president using the lack of scrutiny afforded by the platform’s small user base to truly let loose.
In the hundreds of “Truths” since he took office, Trump has variously used Truth Social to reimagine himself as a king and to urge Americans to “BE COOL!” as the stock market tanked in the wake of his trade war, the president’s seemingly random use of capital letters, punctuation and inaccurate spelling consistent across the messages.
Trump’s posts broadly fit into three categories: attacking perceived foes, reposting praise and posting no-context images or videos of himself, like an elderly relative in a family group chat.
Judges – or “radical left judges”, as Trump would have them – have come in for particular criticism, the president eschewing normal decorum to lambast those members of the judiciary who won’t let him deport people without due process.
“What is going on with our Courts? They are totally OUT OF CONTROL,” Trump wrote on 18 April, responding to a judge’s ruling that the government cannot deport noncitizens to a country other than their place of origin without due process.
Trump then made the extraordinary, and untrue, claim that Joe Biden had flown more than half a million undocumented immigrants to the US in one 24-hour period, before adding:
“This Radicalized Judge is saying that Sleepy Joe Biden can fly more than half a million Illegals into America, IN ONE DAY, but we have to hold many years of long and tedious trials to fly each and every one of them back home. Where is the JUSTICE here???”
That was one of just several furious complaints about judges not letting Trump do as he pleases, but his focus also went beyond the judiciary to the executive branch.
Letitia James, the New York attorney general who oversaw the prosecution and conviction of Trump over hush-money payments to an adult film star, has been a frequent target in recent weeks.
Trump has repeatedly posted stories from rightwing news sites which accuse James of alleged mortgage fraud. James has said the accusations are “baseless” – while also finding herself described by Trump’s thumbs as a “wacky crook”, among other insults.
Yet Trump’s Truth Social account does, sometimes, offer tender moments. No one, for example, treated the death of Pope Francis with more reverence than Donald Trump.
“Melania and I will be going to the funeral of Pope Francis, in Rome. We look forward to being there!” Trump posted hours after the death of the pontiff. He followed that up by posting a video of a speech he gave at the White House, during which Trump praised Pope Francis as “a good man” while standing next to the Easter Bunny.
The posts come thick and fast – Trump frequently writes on Truth Social more than a dozen times a day – interrupted only by adverts for “dream singles” and “international singles”. Amid the complaining about the rule of law and personal score-settling, sometimes Trump announces things that would be good for people who are not on Truth Social, which is most people, to know.
“ALERT: All purchases of Iranian Oil, or Petrochemical products, must stop, NOW!” Trump wrote on Thursday afternoon. He warned that countries that purchase oil from Iran would be subject to “secondary sanctions”, before signing off in the manner of a passive-aggressive tenant writing to their landlord:
“Thank you for your attention to this matter, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.”
It was an important notice. Unfortunately, only about 5 million people use Truth Social each month, so Trump may have been screaming into the void. The diatribes about judges and tariffs, and the all-caps, slightly hysterical entreaties of “Vladimir, STOP!” after Russia launched its latest attack on Ukraine, account for much of the content.
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But they are interrupted by a sprinkling of no-context posts – photos and videos posted to Trump’s account with little explanation: the messaging style of an elderly relative in a group chat.
“Just landed in Italy!” he posted on 25 April, attached with a video of him getting off a plane.
Earlier that month he posted a seven-second video of him swinging at a golf ball. No information was provided, similarly to his actions in March, when Trump posted an image that had been heavily edited, apparently with the intention of giving him a jawline, with the words “Fight Fight Fight”. There was no text accompanying the photo.
Of course, a favorite Trump pastime is reposting praise of himself. Luckily for a man who has managed to turn the Republican party from a sober political institution into what is essentially a cult, there is plenty to go around.
On 18 March, he posted a screengrab of an X post from a user called @Dndbreakfast which said: “A reminder of what a warrior looks like” above a photo of Trump after a bullet grazed his ear in July last year. It was unclear where Trump found @Dndbreakfast’s X post, as he does not follow them on X.
Beyond that, if there is a final common feature among Trump’s use of Truth Social, it is his freeform, frequently unhinged posts. In early February, Trump banged out a lengthy missive which was ostensibly about the economy and trade but read as if it were being shouted at townsfolk through a bull horn.
“The ‘Tariff Lobby,’ headed by the Globalist, and always wrong, Wall Street Journal, is working hard to justify Countries like Canada, Mexico, China, and too many others to name, continue the decades long RIPOFF OF AMERICA, both with regard to TRADE, CRIME, AND POISONOUS DRUGS that are allowed to so freely flow into AMERICA,” was the first sentence.
Trump rambled a bit more before declaring: “THIS WILL BE THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA! WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!). BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID. WE ARE A COUNTRY THAT IS NOW BEING RUN WITH COMMON SENSE – AND THE RESULTS WILL BE SPECTACULAR!!!”
The results of the tariffs are yet to be seen. But Trump’s thoughts and views, disseminated hourly on his little-used social media network, are certainly spectacular.
