Lately, as part of my routine news consumption, I’ve checked Donald Trump’s blog to see if he’s published anything related to voting rights or election systems. This morning, however, the former president’s blog wasn’t there.
I assumed Team Trump was having technical troubles. As CNBC reported this morning, that wasn’t the problem.
Former President Donald Trump’s blog — a webpage where he shared statements after larger social media companies banned him from their platforms — has been permanently shut down, his spokesman said Wednesday. The page, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” has been scrubbed from Trump’s website after going live less than a month earlier.
Jason Miller, a top aide to the former president, confirmed to CNBC that the blog “will not be returning.”
To fully appreciate why this is an amazing end to an unfortunate story, let’s review how we arrived at this point.
After Trump was forced from the major social-media platforms for violating their terms of service, the Associated Press reported in March that the Republican was planning to unveil his own social-media platform “in two or three months.”
Jason Miller told Fox News at the time that the former president was poised to “completely redefine the game” with his new tech initiative.
It was against this backdrop that Fox News reported on May 4 — not quite a month ago — that Trump and his team had launched a new “communications platform,” powered by a “digital ecosystem” created by Brad Parscale, the former president’s former campaign manager.
Right off the bat, there was an obvious problem: the new “communications platform” was little more than a rudimentary blog, utilizing technology that’s existed for many years.
A week after the blog went live, NBC News reported that things were “not going well” for the former president’s online home, with weak traffic and little reader engagement. Two weeks later, the Washington Post reported that the blog was failing so badly that Trump was sliding into online “irrelevance.” The article added, “Since the blog’s launch … online data shows relatively few people have paid attention.” At a certain level, this didn’t come as too big of a surprise. After all, at issue was a former president with an unimpressive blog, utilizing outdated tech, which apparently didn’t even allow for clean paragraph breaks. Of course its traffic was weak. But the context made matters worse. For one thing, Team Trump said his online presence would “redefine the game,” which, as his blog disappears after less than a month, obviously did not happen. For another, Trump is supposed to be overseeing a legion of obsessive followers who eagerly await his every thought. Evidently, these supporters continue to hold the former president in high regard, but they couldn’t be bothered to check out his underwhelming website.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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