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Writer's pictureMike Weisser

When It Comes to Media, Trump's Got Everyone Beat.


              Ahhhhh…shit! Just when I thought I had finally made it into the Top 10 of the bloggers, I get slapped down again.

              Last week I posted a story about how Trump’s Truth Social website is following Trump Air and the United States Football League into oblivion. I got the story from Forbes, which was based on a filing that the company which owns Truth Social sent to the SEC.

              The Forbes story stated that Truth Social had lost $73 million since it began operations, largely due to minimal revenue from advertisers. The only ad I see over the past three days is a company which pushes investing in gold because precious metals are a better bet than money issued by the Deep State.

              Every right-wing media program carries this advertising because it allegedly appeals to people who believe in conspiracy theories which are the stock-in-trade of Donald Trump and the alt-right. This is the same mentality which doesn’t want to get vaccinated because we know ‘for a fact’ that vaccinations cause cerebral palsy or worse.

              Rush Limbaugh used to do an ad for a company – this was really great – which was selling a non-prescription remedy for swollen prostate conditions and made the point in the ad of specifically saying that their product would reduce swollen prostates because it had been ‘tested’ in the general population, not just in medical labs.

              Because I am a Truth Social subscriber (as don Corleone would say, ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer’) I then received an email which was the copy of a letter sent to anyone and everyone who had published the story about Truth Social’s financial collapse, demanding a retraction and apology for anything negative which had been said.

              Yesterday, and this is what really pisses me off, Trump upped the ante, so to speak, and sued 20 media outlets for carrying what he claimed were fictitious statements about Truth Social’s financial condition. The outlets included Axios, Daily Beast, Salon, MSNBC – the usual Trump-hating crew who are being sued for $1.5 billion in damages because they engaged in a conspiracy to damage Trump’ media operation and shut down his digital space.

              Meanwhile, goddamnit, I didn’t receive a copy of the lawsuit. I’m not one of those companies who’s trying to ruin Trump. In the greater scheme of digital things, I’m still small potatoes, if that.

              Nevertheless, despite my lowly stature in internet-land, I’m still impressed with Trump’s ability to keep himself in the public eye, a presence which goes far beyond anything that any previous President has ever done.

              I’m not just talking about the indictments, the trials, and the daily stories about how, when and where Trump planned January 6th and the aftermath. When was the last time you heard from George Bush, Bill Clinton, or Barack? So. Jimmy Carter got into the news this week because lovely Rosalynn died.

              I’m willing to take the short odds that Trump already has a plan for going digital while he’s in jail. For all I know, he had someone doing a daily video of his work in the Oval Office, which will be sold to Netflix as a docudrama called ‘The Trump Years.’

              This is a guy, I’m talking about Donald Trump, who has redefined the Presidency to take advantage of the new way that we all communicate which we call ‘social media’ in case you didn’t know.

              And when the next version of Marshall McLuhan writes the definitive work on how we stopped watching television and started squinting into those telephone screens, Donald Trump will finally be recognized as the uniquely powerful innovator which he really is.

             

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