It isn’t easy to make a comeback, Donald, just ask your soulmate Norma Desmond. She’ll tell you. She experienced the same thing, being a big star, the center of all attention, commanding great power, yuge salary — and then? And then she lost an election of sorts, too.
The motion picture industry elected to go with talkies and that was the end of dear Norma. But being of considerable mettle, not to mention even greater delusion, the middle aged Norma decided that she was going to do a star turn in her version of a fable that was written for a hot teenager, Salome — as she herself had once been a hot teenager.
Everything rested on the Salome script for Norma to be a star again, just as everything now rests on social media, if Donald Trump is going to regain his ascending star. And you know how Norma’s story ended.
Josh Marshall distills it all down in a few paragraphs of his newsletter.
I say all the following not for a moment discounting the threat Donald Trump continues to be to the American republic. But since the announcement of his reelection bid, immediately after a discrediting electoral defeat more than two months ago, he’s seemed less a swaggering warlord planning his return than a diminishing voice less and less relevant to the political happenings of the day. His claims and attacks become more vitriolic as his volume gets turned lower and lower.
Just this week he launched a broadside against white evangelicals, the most loyal and militant portion of his political base. They were “disloyal,” he said, and he blamed some of the 2022 reverses on them: “I thought they could’ve fought much harder during the election, the ’22 election.” This after an earlier interview where he blamed no-exceptions abortion bans for the 2022 defeats. This is angry desperation, not any ability to read the room.
Now comes word that Trump is coming back to Twitter and, he hopes, Facebook too. It makes perfect sense and it’s the right read of his current predicament. He can rant on his lifestyle social network, Truth Social. And those rants are often reprinted on Twitter. But it’s not the same. He’s someone you can barely hear in the far distance. For Trump, that’s a living death.
Marshall goes on to comment on one of the most embarrassing situations that Trump endured recently when Matt Gaetz nominated him for House Speaker and it was treated as a joke. For a man with an ego that size, that could not have been easy to swallow.
One of the key signs came in the GOP’s humiliating first week of the January as Kevin McCarthy struggled to beg for the Freedom Caucus holdout votes to become speaker. The logjam was broken when McCarthy agreed to hand over effective control of the House to President Trump’s most ardent supporters, the biggest defenders of the Big Lie and in many cases participants in the 2020/21 coup attempt.
But Trump’s name was barely mentioned. The exceptions proved the rule. Lauren Boebert name checked him once to say she was defying him. Matt Gaetz finally nominated him for speaker. But no one else voted for him. He came behind not only McCarthy and Hakeem Jeffries but even randoms like whichever other backbencher they were nominating that round.
It was the House Trump built. But Trump himself was nowhere to be seen.
Trump is a showman first and foremost. He knows that he’s in a mess right now and things can’t continue this way. He needs numbers. He needs ratings. He needs to be in the limelight. And his one and only hope is social media.
He needs to be back on Twitter and on Facebook to make some stab at being relevant again, at controlling news cycles rather than disappearing from them. He’s been allowed back on Twitter since November. But in some power play with Elon Musk he’s refused to tweet. Now he knows he has to. I don’t know if it will help him at this point. But he has no choice.
To tweet or not to tweet is no longer the question. Trump has to tweet. What that will do to his fortunes at Truth Social, let alone his political fortunes, nobody knows. Truth Social is financed through September but if Trump starts stirring up the pot on Twitter, who knows how that will affect his own struggling platform? I cannot think that it would be for the better.
But that’s truly the least of Trump’s worries. He needs to come out of the shadows and get relevant again and dominate the news cycle. This is his must-have. He cannot fail.
His problem is that his act is old and tired. Everybody’s seen it. He dumps the same amount of outrage and vitriol on Truth Social everyday as he ever did back in the 2016 campaign, but he’s reaching a deadened audience. The post-Trump audience doesn’t shock like the pre-Trump audience did. We’re too shell shocked. We’ve got too many layers of scar tissue on our nerves. Short of setting fire to puppies on live TV, Trump’s got nothing left to shock with.
In 2016 if he had called the FBI and the DOJ the “Gestapo” that would have been worldwide headlines. Today it barely garners a yawn, hardly ever a second glance.
It will be interesting to see what a cornered Trump does. The sublime irony here is that he used to dominate the news cycle at will. All it took was the right outrageous tweet and he was off. Nowadays he can’t get arrested.
If Bill Palmer has the right of it, he may be unable to make that social media comeback anyway. Remember that he is STILL banned from Facebook (no signs I’ve seen of that changing, though if I’ve missed it, someone do enlighten me). And despite Musk lifting the Twitter ban, Trump may well be contractually obligated to not tweet either (i.e. possibly the REAL reason he didn’t come back, as he has enough legal headaches and not enough lawyers).
I wouldn’t rule out him setting puppies on fire next. But, as you say, Ursula, I would rule out it helping him here.
Regarding FB, or Meta as Zuckerberg is so desperately trying to get everyone to call and think of it bear in mind Elon Musk isn’t the only one who has seen his net worth plummet in the last year. Z-man’s toddler’s petulant insistence on making FB into his Meta vision has cost HIM a ton of money too. It’s not like the both of them don’t still have gobs of money. But these are assholes with extraordinary egos, even bigger than Presidential aspirant egos or even mega “successful” dictators. Their sense of “superiority” to the rest of us mere mortals is directly tied to their vast wealth and competing for being the richest of them all. Neither is in that particular game anymore. Their egos are suffering from that every bit as much as Trump’s is from not getting his periodic “fix” from soaking up the “love” from a screaming crowd of MAGA goobers! If Trump brings in clicks and therefore revenue as they believe will be the case then he’s back as far as they are concerned. Musk has already given the green light. Zuckerberg still calls the shots at FB and is simply working the PR angle of the “process” in an attempt to mollify users who will be pissed when Trump is reinstated. He’ll try the whole “It wasn’t my choice – there was a process followed and I ‘respect’ the decision of that committee.” Pure bullshit of course but like Musk, Z-man is desperate to start making money again instead of losing it. ANYTHINT to stop the bleeding!
Pointing out something is possible and it actually happening are related but different phenomena. So all you just said was a longer version of what I’d been told on Trump still being off FB.
On that note, you gotta imagine Zuck took one look at the Trumpsuckers coming back on Twitter and how it did zip to stop the bleeding on Musk’s own finances. Also, the contract language for Truth Social is pretty clear: Trump posts on it first and must wait a minimum of six hours before reposting on another social media platform. And that language applies for the next two years. So how does the Z-Man benefit from being sloppy seconds again? Yeah, Trump may well break the contract language but, as you pointed out, the Man Who Would Be Zuck has ENOUGH troubles thanks to his Meta experiment (which, fun fact, I managed to get a Quest unit from it for free…long story). He neither wants nor needs Trump’s on top of it.
Space karen will give the mango moron a twitter platform-this is a given since he hasn’t QUITE yet destroyed the platform (damn-wish he’d get after this a bit quicker). I see in the above comments someone is thinking former guy is contractually bound to use only his own platform. I have one thing to ask: since when has trump thought contracts he was supposed honor, something he absolutely, unequivocally fulfill? The man has avoided contractual obligations like he avoids disease. Contractual obligations have always been for others to follow, never him.