Trump has lost most of his influence — and he knows it

The media and the public are losing interest in the former president, even as he struggles to maintain relevance, writes Phil Thomas

(Getty)

On Monday afternoon, Jason Miller, an aide to Donald Trump, tweeted: “Hot fire POTUS 45 statement coming shortly!”

Sure enough, about an hour after that drumroll teaser, a lengthier than usual statement from the man-forbidden-to-tweet-himself emerged.

“Hot fire” might be a generous way to describe the contents. The former president crows about CNN and MSNBC getting lower ratings (“They should have embraced and endorsed ‘Trump’,” he writes); he boasts that a majority of Republicans believe his false claims about election fraud; and he claims rather unconvincingly that he is doing less media in order to keep the focus on Biden’s crises.

So far, so familiar. But finally he gets to what seems the real point of his statement. Weaving between the royal ‘we’ and the third person, Trump addresses the mockery his new website has faced since it was launched earlier this month. Billed as a new social media “platform”, it was quickly and scornfully identified as nothing more than an old-fashioned blog.

Despite the talk put out by his people in early May about the launch of a new social media platform (“It’s going to completely redefine the game,” gushed Jason Miller), Trump now clarifies: “We have not yet launched our own social media ‘platform’.”

He acknowledges that the current reality is a “very basic site” and moans that his numbers would be bigger if only Big Tech had not “illegally banned me” (but are very big anyway).

In a defensive tone he concludes: “This is meant to be a temporary way of getting my thoughts and ideas out to the public without the Fake News spin, but the website is not a ‘platform’. It is merely a way of communicating until I decide on what the future will be for the choice or establishment of a platform. It will happen soon. Stay tuned!”

In short – stop laughing at my blog, I/we/“Trump” haven’t decided quite what to do yet.

Not a statement destined for the annals of American history, then. But the attention-loving former president may be right to worry about the state of his comms.

According to The Washington Post, social media engagement with Trump is at its lowest point since he ran for president in 2016, and is 95 per cent down even since January.

“The difference is ridiculous,” Megan Squire, an Elon University computer science professor who studied the data, told the Post. “He doesn’t have that same ability anymore to constantly put his content in people’s faces the way he did before.”

Separately, the Pew Research Center published research this week revealing that Trump isn’t even being mentioned nearly as much in news stories about the man who beat him to the White House any more.

Not surprisingly, Trump featured prominently in post-November 3 news reports, what with challenging the election results and then inciting a riot at the Capitol. But now, Pew finds, with the Biden administration getting down to serious business at a rate of knots, and Mar-a-Lago’s most famous resident not trusted with social media accounts, mentions of his name have fallen in Biden stories from about half to 30 per cent in early March before later picking up again slightly.

Trump remains the most popular figure in the GOP by a country mile, although he is coy about whether he will run again in 2024. But for a man for whom publicity has always been his greatest weapon, being forced to put out Monday evening statements deflecting mockery for his blog is not quite the bully pulpit he was once used to.

If he does want to continue to dominate the GOP for years to come, that upgrade to a social media “platform” can’t come soon enough.

Yours,

Phil Thomas

Assistant editor (US)