How Trump became an online flop in 2021 Blog gets
Post# of 123669
Blog gets yanked
Eric Boehlert
Jun 3
After less than a month of postings, Trump’s blog was officially taken offline this week, after drawing an embarrassingly small audience. Loyalists will no longer be able to check on “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” to read his latest, bitter musings.
The sudden move to unplug the aging Florida blogger comes as Trump continues to struggle to attract an online audience after getting de-platformed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the wake of the January 6, mob attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The social media giants rightly accused Trump of inciting violence and of depicting the mob vigilantes as patriots. Once accustomed to seeing his tweets and Facebook posts garnering millions of likes and responses, Trump now finds himself lost in the online wilderness, ignored and rejected.
NBC News last week reported that Trump’s blog had “attracted a little over 212,000 engagements,” a shockingly small number for someone of his political status. By comparison, when Trump got banned for life from Twitter, he had 88 million followers.
While Trump is widely seen as the odds on favorite to win the 2024 Republican nomination if he decides to run again, competing in a general election campaign with virtually no online presence could pose a major problem for the him.
Although there had been chatter about Trump launching an ambitious media play in his post-presidency years, he’s always been lazy. Which is why the idea that he’d undertake the Herculean task of building a social media outpost from nothing always seemed farfetched. To date, it’s clear he’s taken a haphazard approach to his website.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Trump’s blog was taken down because he was upset that people were making fun of its paltry audience. Going back to his days at “The Apprentice,” Trump has always used ratings as a way to judge a person’s worth. One of his favorite putdowns as president was to claim that a particular news network had bad ratings, which means his dismal showing online this year no doubt stings.
Especially after his flak Jason Miller had hyped the site as “hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game.”
https://pressrun.media/p/how-trump-became-an-...Z1wzxTV64k