'Trump’s deranged outrage style' is history as Truth Social becomes a 'slow-cooking financial disaster': analyst

In his column for Politico, analyst Jack Shafer predicted Donald Trump's Truth Social will go down as "one of the biggest social media flops of the decade" and the former president has no one to blame but himself.

According to the columnist, the warning signs were there for all to see after Trump's launched a blog in 2021 that lasted a mere 29 days before collapsing due to its inability to draw an audience.

As Schafer pointed out, the former president had attracted 89 million followers on Twitter before the platform banned him over, as the social media company put it: the "Risk of further incitement of violence" after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

After he was banned across the board by Facebook and other platforms, the former president announced plans to create his own internet soapbox from which to spout his complaints and attacks as well as for his followers to congregate and share their thoughts.

What has followed has been technical difficulties, financial woes and a general disinterest by conservatives as only 3.9 million have signed up.

That led Shafer to ask rhetorically, "Where did the magic go? Why have Trump’s followers forsaken him? Is Truth Social doomed?"

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"During his first campaign and presidency, even a garden-variety Trump tweet could convulse newsrooms. But that was a function of his front-runner status and later his place in the Oval Office. He drew an enormous audience not because he was Donald Trump tweeting but because he was the tweeting president. The power of the office endowed his tweets with muscle that could move financial markets, bury political careers, inspire death threats against his enemies and make the press snap to attention," he wrote. "But exiled to Mar-a-Lago and denied his social media accounts rendered him just another celebrity squeaking noises from a tiny soapbox. When his profile shrank, he became easier to ignore."

Add to that, he wrote, Trump's act has grown "stale."

"Blame it on the network effect. If you already have a Twitter account, it takes just a millisecond to click and add another person’s feed to your account. But downloading a new app just to follow a single somebody takes mental energy, especially if there aren’t many other accounts on the app you wish to follow," he explained before offering, "Trump out of office proved to be as boring as Trump in office was disruptive."

"There’s also evidence that Trump has simply exhausted the Trump meme he invented. Trump’s deranged outrage style once contained real entertainment value — which explains why moderates and liberals followed him on Twitter even if they wouldn’t vote for him," he continued. "But in his post-presidency and especially in the weeks following the Mar-a-Lago search and investigation, the show has gone stale."

Sticking the knife in and twisting it, the analyst suggested, "He’s become a carnival geek biting the heads off of snakes, which can be a fabulous show the first couple of times you see it, but after that, meh. Could today’s Trump devise enough fresh outrage to produce even a brief TikTok?"

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