Why isn't Trump on X? What do you mean, he is?

When everyone's got a hammer, you can't be heard for the banging

I’d have liked to have made the hands smaller but couldn’t figure out how to get Ideogram to do so.

Cast your mind back ten years, to the US presidential election that kicked off in earnest in 2015. The most powerful weapon that Donald Trump had in his campaign first to become the Republican candidate and then to win the presidency was a text box which allowed a maximum of 140 characters: his Twitter account.

Trump used it in a way that had never been seen before from a politician. He was rude about women. He was scathing about opponents. He made wild claims and then ignored any attempts by journalists or opponents to follow them up. His account was a hammer that he used to hit the thumbs of any opponent.

Things didn’t change much when he came into power: he still tweeted obsessively, which meant that his first reign of error was one where his Cabinet, the GOP and journalists took their lead on what the story of the day was from whatever appeared on Twitter (as it was still called then). With the character limit still at 140 (it wasn’t expanded to 280 until November 2017) the first Trump administration was brusque as well as brutal. Trump didn’t interact, though he would sometimes retweet things, giving the impression of a slightly bored senior passing time waiting for something better to turn up. After all, he was only president.

Then came January 6 in 2021, and the insurrection, and Twitter decided that Trump was not in fact president any longer, and “permanently suspended” (not quite the same as deleted) his account. It also deleted tweets that he tried to post from other official accounts that the Biden administration hadn’t taken control of.

As we know, Trump didn’t go away. Instead he bumped around various social networks before settling on Truth Social, where during Biden’s administration his account generated various wild outputs. It still seemed to be Trump, but.. diminished?

Fast forward to 2024, and look! Trump was back as the Republican candidate. But something was missing. Although Elon Musk had bought Twitter and reinstated Trump’s account, it simply wasn’t being used. The hammering had gone quiet; it was coming from over in Truth Social, but short-form social media posts had stopped being the main way that he got his message across. Instead it was through his long, rambling rally speeches, and his appearances on long, rambling podcasts, and shorter, rambling appearances on TV interviews.

What had happened? As much as anything, everyone else caught up. The GOP in particular absorbed the lessons that had been taught in the first four years. Charlie Warzel observed in a column for the Atlantic that we were now witnessing “the gleeful cruelty of the White House X account”:

In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful.

…Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend [of rendering everyday pictures in the Studio Ghibli style], for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

The people running the White House’s X account are doing all the things that Trump used to do back in 2016. JD Vance, the vice-president, takes on all comers (not always successfully) on the same network—which is a departure from his boss’s style, which was never, ever to engage with the plebs.

Vance, though, can’t restrain his urge to Own The Libs, which to be honest is a much less impressive look than Trump’s monumental indifference. It may be the case that the Coca-Cola the president drinks is the same drink that you and the homeless man drink, but the president doesn’t discuss how it tastes with the homeless bum.

Amid all of this, though, where is Trump? Where are his witty aperçus on the state of the world? It turns out that not only are they posted on Truth Social, but they’re also on X. Yes: the realdonaldtrump account is there, and posting things:

Sixty million views? You sure about that?

Yet I had to go and look for it earlier this week when I was thinking about writing this. I was honestly astonished to find it was posting new stuff, because as far as I can tell, it’s gained absolutely zero traction inside or outside X. His slightly longer and more deranged posts at Truth Social seem to do that, but their ALL CAPS nature puts a lot of the media off them.

Or perhaps people just don’t find them.. very engaging? It was astonishing ten years ago, but now when the social media account for the president’s office is leaping onto zero-day memes to post viciously triumphal pictures, the Trump act is nothing special on social media.

Is that good? I have a feeling that it isn’t, really. It’s not that we’re habituated to him. It’s more that he now has so many imitators, or people who have taken it further, that the floor of brutality has been raised. This doesn’t mean that you have to be brutal to be there—one of the most life-affirming social media accounts is that of Niall Harbison, a sweet Irishman who runs the Happy Doggo centre in Thailand where he rescues and rehomes street dogs. (Will there be a tariff on dogs rehomed from Thailand to the US? So many questions.)

But it does mean that if you’re going to be brutal, you have a lot of experienced competition. Unfortunately, the US’s leadership has decided that it wants to go down that path, and it may take quite some time to dial that back. The day will eventually come, but the snapback is going to be quite dramatic when it does.

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