Latest Trump grift revealed to be a grift

I’ve gotten a few dozen of these emails in the last few weeks. This one is from this morning:

“Friend,

Did you see this?

President Trump’s NEW social media site has LAUNCHED and he already posted his first TRUTH – and we need to ask you something IMPORTANT before it’s too late.

What will YOUR USERNAME be?
WHAT WILL YOUR USERNAME BE?

SUBMIT RESPONSE >>
You have 15 MINUTES to tell us what your username will be before we’re forced to assume you WILL NOT be supporting President Trump’s NEW SOCIAL MEDIA SITE. Don’t let us down.
WHAT WILL YOUR USERNAME BE?

SUBMIT RESPONSE >>
Thank you,

GOP HQ”

This missive was paid for by the Republican National Committee in case you pondering.

And just how are things going over at Truth Social anyway?

When we last checked in with Truth Social, the alternative social media network launched by Donald Trump after he was booted from Twitter and temporarily Facebook for inciting a violent insurrection, things were not going great. The February rollout had been a predictable shitshow, as would-be users were hit with numerous glitches, ridiculously long wait times, and, in many cases, a message that they’d been placed on a wait list that appeared to be more than 100,000 people long. SimilarWeb, which provides website data analysis, had estimated that the average visitor to the site spent only 90 seconds there, compared to the seven and nine minutes users spent on conservative networks Gettr and Gab, respectively, The Daily Beast reported. Trump himself, a former Twitter obsessive who’d once sent 200 tweets and retweets in a single day, had posted just once since the launch, telling followers, “Your favorite President will see you soon!”

Given that Trump ascended to the White House in part based on the lie that he was an extremely successful businessman, many people are undoubtedly curious if he and the Truth Social team have been able to turn things around. And it appears that the answer is: Not at all! In fact, things have gotten worse.

For starters, as of last week, “daily active users” were clocking in at 513,000, compared to Twitter’s roughly 217 million visitors, according to The Daily Beast. (Here, it’s relevant to note that Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, claimed that it would not only disrupt social media networks, but “Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google” as well, according to a pitch deck obtained by Insider in October.) The Daily Beast, citing data shared by the analytics firm Apptopia, also reports that Truth Social downloads “have plummeted from a peak of 170,000 downloads a day to just 8,000 now,” and that the app is only the 355th most popular app on Apple devices. And users who have added it to their phones or tablets aren‘t thrilled with the results. “I’ve been waiting for this. It’s finally released, and it doesn’t work,” reads one AppStore review first cited by The Daily Beast. Says another: “Links broken everywhere. Tried to delete my account and it says FORBIDDEN. Then tried to change password and it says that page doesn’t exist. Another Trumpy failed business venture.” As reporter Asawin Suebsaeng put it on Monday, “It is wild Truth Social…is eating shit this hard at this stage in the game, given the big $$$, political celebrity, & infrastructure behind it.”

And customers aren’t the only ones frustrated with the site. Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, the company’s chief of technology and chief of product development, respectively, who “joined the venture last year and quickly became central players in its bid to build a social-media empire,” have both resigned from their positions less than a year after joining, Reuters reports. Incredibly, despite what a total disaster Truth Social has been thus far, insiders believe the two men were apparently the one thing keeping the site from bombing even further, from “total disaster” to scrap heap of corporate history. “If Josh has left…all bets are off,” a source told Reuters of Adams, describing him as the “brains” behind the app’s technology. Another source told the outlet that Boozer played a crucial leadership role at the company. (Boozer declined Reuters’ request for comment and Adams did not respond.) Incidentally, it appears that the two were professionally successful before joining the ex-president’s venture. Adams cofounded a product and software consulting firm that counted the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the FBI, and e-commerce company Shipt among its clients, according to Reuters. A source told Reuters that Boozer “had collaborated frequently with Adams before joining Truth Social.”ADVERTISEMENT

As both The Daily Beast and Reuters note, Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes, who left his job in Congress to run this thing, had said he expected the network would be “fully operational” in the U.S. by last Thursday, a goal he did not meet. Truth Social also still does not have an app for Android users, despite them making up “more than 40% of the U.S. market,” Reuters reports.

This utterly incompetent clown, whose only talent is for doing fascist standup improv that allows him to rip off people just as dumb but not nearly as narcissistically feral as he is, was president of the United States, and is probably going to be again in two and half years (Before commenter James Shearer gets to that, the fact that Trump has per Predictit only a 39% chance of getting the GOP nomination should be viewed in the context of the site’s estimate of the odds that Joe Biden gets the Democratic nomination — also 39% — and that Hillary Clinton has a 6% chance of seizing the latter laurel.)