Last week’s announcement that former President Donald Trump would launch a new social network set market watchers and political junkies ablaze. That’s partly because Trump has been banished or suspended from major social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, sharply curtailing his public profile and media influence. It’s also because his new enterprise, Trump Media & Technology Group, is aiming to go public via a special purpose acquisition vehicle. Since Wednesday’s announcement, an investor frenzy has driven the implied value of the SPAC above $8 billion.
Trump is pining to reclaim his social media dominance. He’s sued Twitter, asking a federal judge to restore access to his account with 79 million followers. And he used the announcement of his forthcoming site, Truth Social, to lodge yet another gripe. “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” the former president wrote. “This is unacceptable.”
The press materials for Truth Social tout it as the “first major rival to ‘Big Tech’” and juxtapose the new network, slated for a 2022 launch, with social media behemoths such as Twitter and Facebook. But this is almost certainly misleading. Trump’s interest in social media has always been twofold: to make money and to exert public influence. It’s already clear that his new endeavor will accomplish the former; but there’s no sign at all—and no reason to expect—that it will achieve the latter.
Rumors about how Trump might cash in on his online popularity were rife even before he was elected president. In fall 2016, Trump’s campaign advisers openly speculated to Bloomberg Businessweek that he might take his millions of Facebook followers and email list of 14 million people and launch “Trump TV”—noting that Trump had paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds and could deploy it to whatever purpose he pleased if he lost the election. “Trump is an entrepreneur,” Steve Bannon, his campaign chairman, noted a few weeks before Election Day. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine.”
Of course, Trump beat Hillary Clinton and had no need to build out a Trump TV network. But after leaving office earlier this year, two advisers say, he considered lending his name to several social media networks, including Gettr and Parler. No deal was ever consummated. On the other hand, his agreement with Digital World Acquisiton Corp., the shell company that intends to merge with Trump’s new network, already looks to be a smashing success in financial terms—and might be even if Truth Social comes to naught. On Monday, DWAC was trading near $100 a share, having skyrocketed from $9.96 a share shortly before the deal was announced. Bloomberg estimates, based on press releases and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, that Trump will own more than 50% of the joint company, making him the richest he’s ever been.
Let’s suspend disbelief for just a moment and assume that Truth Social becomes the rare Trump business venture that goes off without a hitch: The MAGA crowd flocks to sign up, the app doesn’t crash, and Trump stops brooding about being put in the Twitter doghouse and starts posting gustily on his new app. It still won’t restore him to the center-of-the-culture status he cherished when he was riding high on Twitter and Facebook, for the same reason that the bevy of startup right-wing alternatives from Gettr to Parler to Rumble haven’t managed to do so. The broader public, including the all-important gatekeepers of mainstream media coverage, doesn’t frequent those sites, nor do most of the people they interact with in their daily lives. The alternative networks are a self-contained bubble of like-minded thinking. You can’t “own the libs” if the libs aren’t on your social network, so you probably can’t entice the news media, either—even one highly alert for signs of controversy.
Trump can take some solace in the likelihood that he’ll cash in bigly even after Facebook yanked away the basis for what was once supposed to be Trump TV. From a financial standpoint, the age of meme stocks and the mania for shaky looking investments like SPACs may have rendered Facebook’s punishment all but meaningless.
But if Trump wants to regain his primacy in the culture, Truth Social isn’t likely to deliver it to him. Unless, that is, he uses it to announce he’s running for president in 2024.
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Trump's Social Network Won't Give Him What He Wants Most - Bloomberg
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