How Donald Trump Is Hiding in Plain Sight
How Donald Trump Is Hiding in Plain Sight
The shittiness of his Truth Social platform protects him.
DONALD TRUMP’S (FIRST?) PRESIDENTIAL TERM was a big time online for mantras.
“A complete and total shutdown until we can figure out what’s going on,” we’d say.
“More and more people are saying.”
“Only the best people.”
And the big one: “There’s always a tweet.”
We used to say “there’s always a tweet” a lot. It got at a few things at once about Trump’s online persona: He was always winging it, always putting himself out there in public, always driven more by vibes than any particular principles. He frequently contradicted himself. And for more than a decade, he’d been doing it all on an indexed, searchable microblogging platform that made pulling up and spotlighting the flip-flops and contradictions very easy. Any yahoo could do it. There was always a tweet!
Then came January 6th. Two days later he was “permanently” banned from Twitter. And although Elon Musk restored the former president’s Twitter X account in November 2022, Trump has sent only a single tweet—his mug shot from last August. Other than that, his account has been silent.
These days, of course, Trump has a new platform for his shower thoughts: Truth Social, the funhouse mirror Twitter clone he ordered built after his other social media accounts were deep-sixed.
Trump’s shift to Truth Social has had a strange side effect: He has in some ways become abstracted from the political discourse of which he remains the main character. There’s still lots of talk about Trump, and the news he makes is still widely covered, but his own irreplicable utterances are no longer injected every day directly into the carotid artery of the news. This has had a sanitizing effect, making it easier even for journalists and news junkies to lose track of just how many loose screws the one-time (and future?) commander-in-chief has rattling around upstairs.
But the biggest difference between Twitter-era Trump and Truth Social–era Trump isn’t in how the platform change influences how we see his latest contributions to the discourse. It’s how it alters our ability to remember them as they fade into the past.
On Twitter, surfacing old posts is easy. On Truth Social, it’s impossible. The site’s rudimentary search function lacks the ability to, for instance, pull up all posts from a specific account that mention a specific word. All Trump’s old posts are still there—present on Truth Social’s servers, theoretically accessible to anyone who wants to go find them. It’s just that the only way to do that is by scrolling chronologically down his page, an interminable slog through a deluge of MAGA flotsam—links to articles, screenshots of polls, liveblogs of TV programs, endorsements of random House candidates, sales pitches for Trump NFTs or Trump sneakers. To find something a week or two old is doable, a month or two a major chore. Farther back than that you approach the theoretical limits of human patience.
Much of what Trump says, of course, lodges in the googleable public record. Trump’s posts on Truth Social don’t really show up in normal web searches, and there seems to be no independent archive backing up his posts on the platform as there was for his tweets. Yet he remains one of the most heavily covered people in politics, so if he posts something explosive, odds are it’ll be written up in the news and findable that way. What’s lost is the ability to track more subtle developments in Trump’s thinking.
TAKE THE ONGOING CONFLICT IN UKRAINE. In the immediate aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Republicans, like all Americans, overwhelmingly sympathized with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and admired the courageous resistance of the Ukrainian people. But over time, Republicans grew more hostile to Ukraine and resentful of the notion that America should continue to fund its war efforts.
What was Trump’s specific role in that change? At a high level, of course, it was Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin that set the stage for Republicans to abandon their long-held antipathy toward Russia. But the picture is complicated by the soft spot Trump has for Zelensky himself—who, after all, spoke up during Trump’s first impeachment to suggest he didn’t feel Trump had blackmailed him on their “perfect phone call.” Trump, too, was sympathetic to Ukraine’s cause at first, calling Russia’s attack “appalling,” an “outrage,” and “an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur” in a speech days after the invasion.
When did he change? Did he change? Did Trump help lead the GOP into Ukraine antagonism? Was he himself led there by other forces within his party? Or did he remain largely ambivalent? What were the watershed moments? In the past, there’d be a simple way to reconstruct Trump’s development on an issue like this: He’d have left a trail of bread crumbs in the form of old tweets, data points you could assemble into a narrative with a click. Instead, we’re left with the odd fact that, despite Trump having expressed his thoughts on the subject in a public format seen by hundreds of thousands of people, many of those thoughts are already essentially lost to time.
And that’s just to talk about one of the biggest, most widely covered news stories of the day. The beauty of “there’s always a tweet” was the way people could resurface Trump’s old thoughts on anything—many of which were only particularly interesting because of how they clashed with what he said and did later. These sorts of posts are the ones that are now being swept straight to the ash heap of history.
Whether Truth Social’s opacity is a bug or a feature—the result of shoddy programming or a deliberate design choice intended to frustrate—isn’t quite clear. When I reached out to the site’s operators last month to ask if there was some weird trick by which one could surface old posts, I got a message back suggesting the former: “We appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention. We have shared the information with our team and are working towards a resolution. Thank you for your patience.”
I am not, however, holding my breath for an update. After all, an unsearchable Truth Social still accomplishes the purpose Trump has for it: Ladling daily chum into the seething feeding pit of the MAGA id. Who there cares to resurface months-old chewed-over chum? For Trump and his online followers, Truth Social is the smooth plane of an eternal present, where you can say anything at all as long as it scandalizes the RINOs and owns the libs. Keeping the old stuff around would just box him in.