Did you know that former edgelord president Donald J. Trump is now an edgelord blogger? Most people do not, evidently. Operation: Blog, aka “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” launched last Tuesday. In the meantime Trump has posted 19 times, beginning with an Armageddon-inspired trailer ending with the message “SAVE AMERICA.” America has not yet been saved, and data reveals that the ratings (or whatever they call it in “blog”) are a hair’s breadth away from a MySpace page.
As NBC first noticed, data from the social media analytics company BuzzSumo shows that the blog now has a little over 221,000 total organic shares across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and links. (This isn’t counting backlinks from news sites announcing the launch of the blog.) His worst-performing post, ringing in at 25 shares, contains whining about how “election reforms” in Georgia didn’t pass in time for him to win the presidency.
BuzzSumo data shows that Kourtney Kardashian’s blog Poosh is putting up nearly 600,000 views on an average Tuesday.
The blog is either highly suspect or represents a stunning achievement. First, someone’s gotta upload blogs, on a computer, which he famously does not do: meaning that in mere months, he has learned to process words through a word processor, master a browser, keep track of login credentials, and navigate the mind-bending complexity of the backend. He has adopted the Oxford comma and occasionally correctly places other commas between independent clauses. The spacious single-paragraph format has freed him to spell the full word “and” and to expand the noisy parentheticals into full sentences. In the place of menacing ellipses, one of his favourite tweet closers, thoughts now more logically conclude with exclamation points!
The conquest has publicly evolved from a few thwarted sorties to wrest back his Twitter powers. In February, the Daily Beast reported that he scribbled down insults about Liz Cheney for other people to tweet. After Mission: Napkin Tweet failed to launch, we then received the tweet-length emailed statements on “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” letterhead. (Twitter has suspended an account devoted to tweeting them.) In March, Trump told Newsmax that his mini-press releases were “more elegant than tweeting, as the expression goes.” It’s a blogger expression. The backlog of those faux tweets now appear on Trump’s blog along with recent musings, most of which I won’t transcribe in this blogspace, but he called a racehorse a “junky” the other day.
Nobody is allowed to hang out there or comment or follow, but the terms of service suggest that some social media functions are coming down the pike. It includes a note that the site reserves the right to remove any user-generated content “at any time and for any reason without notice,” exactly the kind of 1984 Censorship(!!) which inspired his executive order to make Twitter let him say whatever he wanted.
You can give him money, but he makes no promises about what he’ll do with it.
Can one blogger save America? Mark Zuckerberg can, in the sense that he can do nothing.