President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign made a surprising announcement this week that they would boldly go where few Democrats (or anyone with any sense) have gone before. They joined Truth Social.
Since social media networks have been popping up and growing like weeds lately, here’s a quick refresher on this one. After former president Donald Trump was thrown off Twitter (now X) for posts that incited violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he created extremely shameless Twitter knockoff Truth Social so he could continue to have a place to post his unhinged all-caps rants and continue to threaten public officials for doing their jobs. It’s now a refuge for his most devoted followers: extremists, racists, insurrectionists, Russian trollbots bent on destroying our democracy, and other brands of deplorable.
And now the Biden campaign has joined those rank ranks? You don’t have to ace a logic test to pick out which one of these is not like the others. And yet … “Let’s see how this goes,” the campaign’s account wrote in its first post on the newly opened account on Monday. “Converts welcome!”
While Biden talks a big game about meeting voters where they are and caring about the concerns of all Americans across the political spectrum, it’s doubtful even his campaign thinks he’s going to persuade many people who are that deep in the Trump echo chamber for misinformation. The more likely explanation: They are trolling him, big time, and not even hiding it.
According to the campaign’s announcement on X, they made the decision mostly because “we thought it would be funny.”
And it is funny! A good idea? Less sure about that. But the results this week have turned out to be more amusing than expected.
By Wednesday afternoon, the follower count of the Biden campaign’s Truth Social account had surpassed that of the Trump campaign’s official account. By Friday, the account with the handle @bidenhq had 33,000 followers, while Trump’s campaign had just over 27,000.
Admittedly, the most obvious question about these stats is “Who cares?” Those followers could easily be spam accounts, trolls looking to make trouble in the mentions, or more disturbingly, actual people who definitely should not have joined Truth Social this week just to follow that account.
But we all know what kinds of things are important to Trump, and superficial popularity measures like follower counts are way up there. This has to be killing him, and that’s kind of fun.
The trolling continues in the posts, which can also be viewed on other social media networks (no need to join Truth Social). Drawing from sources trusted by the political right—while your average Truth Social user is likely to have descended into an echo chamber of ever more biased news sources, where even these voices of dissent are shut out—these posts have consisted almost exclusively of footage of Republican lawmakers, Fox News hosts and guests, and even Trump himself, who in one video, compares the tragedy of the attack on Israel to his own experience of missing a golf tournament.
One post catches far-right Congressman Steve King saying, “Jim Jordan’s loss is a loss for Donald Trump. Trump is simply less dominant than before.” In another, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Green says, “Republican voters across America gave us this majority, and we are throwing it away.” Several video clips show Fox News hosts praising Biden’s Oval Office speech this week.
Fortunately, you can’t read the comments without creating an account. And hell (a.k.a. anything controlled by Trump) will have to freeze over before I do that.
(featured image: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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