Trump still wants to launch some other platform — timing not yet determined — and didn’t like that this first attempt was being mocked as a loser, according to a Trump adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about the former president’s plans.
Launched last month with a grand unveiling replete with an action-movie-style trailer that proclaimed, “In a time of silence and lies, a beacon of freedom arises,” the blog never secured more than a sliver of the spotlight Trump held before he was banned from every major social media site in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
A Post analysis of online data late last month found that the site was attracting fewer visitors than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish. The blog’s prospects hadn’t improved since, even though Trump had taken to writing on it more, a new analysis of online data shows.
Three days after the Post report, Trump released a statement saying his “very basic site” was doing amazingly well, attracting greater attention than during the 2020 election campaign and that it would be doing even better had he not been banned by Facebook and Twitter, actions that denied him direct access to more than 88 million Twitter followers and 35 million Facebook followers.
Trump had said that the site allowed everyone to “see my statements, issued in real time, and engage with the MAGA Movement” and that it would allow him to communicate “until I decide on what the future will be for the choice or establishment of a platform. It will happen soon. Stay tuned!” No other Trump platform has been announced.
Many in the former president’s orbit were annoyed with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale for promoting the blog. But Parscale had defended the website less than two weeks ago, telling The Post it was “built exactly as we pitched it.” “My company spent the last six years building products that helped the president spread his message around the world. And we happily continue to do so,” he said then.
But no details have been shared about the new Trump platform. Social media sites are endlessly more expensive and complicated than a simple blog, requiring a vast infrastructure allowing for user accounts, comments and other modern Web features that were never present on Trump’s site. Trump dictated his messages to his aides, who would print them out so he could revise them with a Sharpie before manually posting them to the blog.
But the site rarely gained much viewership: Trump’s entire website, including his blog, merchandise store and donation page, saw roughly 4 million visits in the week ending May 18 from desktop and mobile devices in the United States — roughly half of the week’s traffic for the right-wing websites Newsmax and the Gateway Pundit, according to an analysis by the online-analytics firm Similarweb, which tracks and estimates traffic and referrals for millions of websites.
That response rate was pitifully low by Trump standards. But even though Trump’s blogging rate actually increased in recent days, including 10 new posts last Tuesday, his blog never got anywhere near his first day’s interest level, averaging about 4,000 interactions a day, BuzzSumo data show.
Every blog post has been scrubbed from the Internet. The old link now redirects to a webpage urging people to give their contact information to a Trump campaign mailing list.
.