I had heard about this earlier today, and Rachel Maddow mentioned it in passing in her opening segment tonight, but I don’t think it’s getting the kind of coverage that it deserves. Which is why I’m, here right?
If you cast your mind back just about a month ago, you probably missed this. I know I almost did, I just caught a quick 90 second spot on MSNBC about it. What was left of the abysmally incompetent political campaign organ put out a slick, almost techno cool 20 second video about a new launching. It was the brand spanking new Trump blog site! It was promoted in the video as a shining light of freedom, typed by His Lowness himself at his desk at Mar-A-Lago, and unfettered by restrictions by techno weenies like Facebook and Twitter. This was the grand unveiling of the Trump alternative to social media since he was blocked from traditional social media.
It bombed! In a terse press release today, the campaign announced that the site was being pulled down, and would not return. There followed some twaddle about the website being a bridge to future undertakings.
Here’s why I think that this is being underreported. Go ahead, you tell me. How is it possible that a guy with what, 40 million Twitter followers? Can’t keep a goddamn blog site going to even a month? Sweet Jesus, we’re creeping our way forward towards two years up and running now! Running a goddamn casino into the ground is almost impossible, running a blog site into the ground in less than a month, with almost unlimited resources? That’s inconceivable.
It turns out the the reason was simple. The site fucking sucked. At the time the Trump forces of darkness decided to pull the plug on this misbegotten venture, statistically it was lagging behind a pet referral service, along with a recipe site called Delish that I’ve never even heard of. And as a kitchen maven, I regularly cruise recipe sites.
You’ll have to excuse me, but I a going to take a victory lap here. Since the day Trump got banished from mainstream social media, I predicted his demise. For the simple reason that Trump supporters are bone fucking lazy! If a Trump supporter had the chance to get an alert on his cell phone or tablet from Trump, they were more than happy to pump their fists and yell out, Yeah! My Man! But if they actually had to sit there, go to Google, and hunt up Trump’s blog site, and then repeatedly go there throughout the day to see if there was anything new, fuck it!, they’ll just watch a monster truck rally rerun instead.
I don’t think that the rest of the GOP has twigged yet as to just what a disaster this is. Twitter has already banned Trump for life, including all of their satellite sites, and I believe that when push comes to shove, Facebook will do the same. People will gladly pay to have the local newspaper delivered to their porch, but if they have to stop at a newsstand to get it on the way to work, it’s too much bother. Welcome to the planet Earth Trump, you’re too much of a bother. And as for Never Speaker Kevin McCarthy? Welcome to the brave new world!
Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35
Heck, Murph, I kept a blog going for five years by myself. I know that some people other than me read it, because there were a few comments. (Not a lot of interest: I was ‘live-blogging’ the Civil War, based on family papers. But it did get them transcribed and assembled into a single doc.)
Murf, as others have noted, what really caused Trump’s “blog” to die so quickly was that, unlike Twitter, he wasn’t limited to what he could post at one time. 140 characters–later 280 characters–really pushed Trump to spew quick (what were essentially) one-liners and, as we all saw, he thrived on that. It was really easy to shoot off short, biting attacks because he got practice. Remember his silly “reality” TV show’s classic, “You’re fired!”? NO ONE remembers much else from the show except that line (at least with “The Weakest Link,” you got the classic one-liner plus some real trivia knowledge). And Trump learned from it. Even his rallies worked best when he just stuck to the stuff he (or, more likely, his staff) prepared and kept things short and to the point; as soon as he jumped script and started improvising and ad-libbing, the rallies started falling apart (even his die-hard fans would start getting bored and restless waiting for the “big hit song” and Trump wasn’t delivering it). And Twitter forced him to keep his comments short.
Once he lost Twitter and started the blog, there was nothing to make him stop once he started.