If former President Donald Trump is a populist, he certainly isn’t a traditional one.
An analysis of the former President’s speeches by UCLA researchers found that he selectively and situationally uses elements of populism. He also strays from traditional populist usages of “the people,” and instead favors negative exclusionary rhetoric through use of “them” and pejorative terms to describe elites. This negative exclusionary rhetoric can broadly be categorized as anti-pluralism, and is one characteristic that German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller uses to identify and define populism.
Müller, in his 2016 book, describes populism as a “particular moralistic imagination of politics” characterized by anti-pluralism, anti-elitism, and the moral claim to be the sole representative of “the people.” Populist logic holds that populist leaders can “divine” the public will based on what it means to be a member of a homogenous group or identity, like a “real American.” Naturally, this lends itself to the creation of new homogenous “publics” for whom its populist creator has been speaking, according to Müller.
So when Twitter, now X, banned the then-President in the days following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, it offered Trump a unique opportunity to craft a powerful tool of populism. After his removal from the platform, Trump wasted no time creating a moral impetus for “great patriots” to go elsewhere — namely, his own alt-tech social media platform, Truth Social.
“Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the radical left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” Trump wrote in a soon-removed tweet from the official @POTUS account shortly after the ban.
The tweet deployed conspiratorial, anti-elitist rhetoric to galvanize a base that ought to feel silenced too. It also reflected the president’s desire to launch his own social media platform that offered refuge from an elite conspiracy of unpatriotic individuals bent on destroying him and his followers. Moreover, it gave him a fresh start at creating the type of “homogenous people” that Müller associates with populism. Truth Social promised a new, redefined public comprised of “real Americans.” From that point forward, Twitter would be for everyone else — or “them.”
Since its launch in February 2022, Truth Social has marketed itself as “America’s ‘Big Tent’ social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.” The site resembles Twitter, now X, and offers users the opportunity to “Truth” and “ReTruth.” But more than two years after its release on app stores, Truth Social is failing by most traditional business metrics. By May 2024, it had less than 80,000 daily active users, and the site’s year-over-year monthly visits fell nearly 40 percent. Its earnings reports paint a similarly grim picture: the platform lost more than $16 million last quarter and brought in only $1 million in revenue. The stock of its parent company — Trump Media — has been volatile since going public, and is largely tied to the outlook of Trump’s political future or current events. Still, it has proven lucrative for him.
Less than a month out from the 2024 election, Truth Social’s “failure” reflects the breakdown of the populist logic that fueled its launch. Its limited and homogenous user base suggests, unsurprisingly, that self-selecting echo chambers marketed as alt-tech social media platforms will lack broad appeal. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to claim that these users are the true American public: if Trump can’t obtain a critical mass of “his people,” it becomes more difficult to credibly claim that they’re the real, homogenous American “people” that he exclusively represents.
The presence of Truth Social users — along with the existence of non-users who would be considered “real people” or “us” —on other social media platforms, like X, is another complicating factor. In March 2024, the former President posted to his platform: “TRUTH SOCIAL IS MY VOICE, AND THE REAL VOICE OF AMERICA!!! MAGA2024!!!”
With 80,000 active daily users, the “real voice of America” could fit inside Michigan Stadium. But more importantly, eighty-seven percent of these same Truth Social users are on Facebook, and more than half are on X — including Trump. The former president returned to X in 2023 and appears to reserve it for only his least angry, devise rhetoric. If Truth Social is his voice, then it’s unclear what his posts on X are.
Above all else, Truth Social’s failure to become its users’ exclusive social media platform exposes its incompatibility with the rationale for its founding. If Twitter and Facebook represent the elites who are bent on censoring Trump and his supporters, why do they continue to use those platforms? Could it be that there are, in fact, “real voice[s] of America” on other platforms?
But maybe Truth Social wasn’t meant to succeed by traditional business metrics. Word of Truth Social’s death — or demise — could be greatly exaggerated. Instead of failing, Truth Social could be functioning as intended under the ownership of a former president: sitting, dormant, waiting for the surge in usership that would accompany a Trump victory in November.
If Trump returns to the White House, his incentive to remain on X and Facebook disappears. It is entirely possible, if not likely, that Truth Social would become the President’s official, if not exclusive, mode of informal public communication. As a sitting president, Trump would effectively force members of the public, foreign leaders, and members of the press to use his proprietary platform to access speech and information. The implications of this extend far beyond ethics rule violations, which could be easily justified as in the public interest or a measure against censorship from illegitimate media gatekeepers. Surges in membership would legitimize attempts to create and homogenize a new public, while enabling future crackdowns on dissenting speech. Political opponents could be silenced, and critics deplatformed.
Nearly three years after its launch, Truth Social is typically characterized as a failure. But these characterizations are ultimately based on the recent past and near future, while neglecting to consider the possibility that Trump returns to office and realizes the platform’s populist potential.
Ethan, thank you for sharing this blog post. The idea of Truth Social as a potentially powerful populist tool was a compelling counterfactual explored throughout this analysis, and I’ll be interested to see how its use manifests in the “factual” sense during Trump’s upcoming presidency. Sure it failed to gain the user base that a populist movement would require the first time around, but might we see more wider use of Truth Social along with the incoming administration?
I’m not convinced that Trump’s recent campaign generated a substantial increase in his “die-hard” supporters that would add to the numbers of those already using Truth Social. Donald Trump was elected on slim popular margins, despite the margins being greater than his defeat in the 2020 election. His success in the 2024 election doesn’t demonstrate that he was widely popular with the American public, but rather that his campaign was merely preferred over Harris’s campaign. I don’t think in conditions such as this, that Truth Social will gain users and heightened popularity come Trump’s inauguration and reentrance into office. In a country where Trump was widely seen as “the lesser of two evils”, I doubt a large mass of those who voted for him will enthusiastically embrace his leadership to the extent of downloading and using his failed social media platform. Perhaps I’m speculating with too much anti-Trump bias, but even from a relatively objective standpoint, I do not foresee Truth Social becoming a powerful populist tool anytime soon.