Former President Donald Trump made his long-awaited return to Twitter/X on Monday night in a glitchy, three-hour livestreamed conversation with that platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
The same day, shares in Truth Social, the rival social platform partly owned by Trump himself, dropped 5%. The stock is down nearly 60% so far this year, mainly over questions of its scant revenue. Last week, the company’s quarterly earnings report revealed that revenues had dropped 30% percent to $836,900 from a year earlier, with a total loss of $16.4 million during the quarter.
But part of the stock’s recent skid may also reflect investor concerns that, if the former president returns to regularly posting on the site now known as X, it may spell trouble for Truth Social, where Trump remains the main event.
“I think it makes sense for Trump to maintain both [accounts]. If he wants to reach more voters, he’s better off doing that with a larger platform,” Eric Dahan, the founder of marketing firm Mighty Joy, told Newsweek. “It’s not one or the other, and it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
Trump has long been known for his prolific tweeting, which he started as one of Twitter‘s early celebrity adopters and kept going through his term in the White House. He would push the limits on the social media platform, with around 26,000 tweets during his presidency — from the innocuous misspellings to sudden threats of nuclear war.
He was booted off Twitter, as well as Facebook, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, which he was accused of inciting.
“From 2015 until Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump was defined by Twitter,” Dan Pfeiffer, the former Obama advisor, wrote in his newsletter Tuesday morning. “He used the platform to drive his message, savage his rivals, and control the four corners of the political conversation.”
Trump eventually founded a competitor to Twitter in Truth Social, which was meant to be a response to the perceived bias of Big Tech against conservatives.
“It was started really in response to censorship, specifically censorship of Trump and other conservative voices,” Dahan said.
But soon after Truth Social was incorporated, Musk personally purchased Twitter for $44 billion, restoring Trump’s account in the process and leaving many to wonder if and when the @realDonaldTrump account would make its return. But Trump didn’t bite at the opportunity to go back to his former stomping grounds at first.
“Musk acquired Twitter and made it X with the goal of making it really a free speech platform or a platform that didn’t have that sort of censorship, I think it achieved the same goals as Truth Social,” according to Dahan.
So if Trump wades back into regularly posting on X, as he appears to be doing, what does that mean for Truth Social?
Dahan noted that X has “a much larger distribution” without the “political stigma that Truth Social has.” Strategically, it makes “far more sense” for any politician to spend time on the platform with a larger reach, he told Newsweek.
Pfeiffer echoed the point: “Trump and Musk need each other,” he wrote.
Until Monday, Trump’s X account was mostly dormant, save for a single post with a photo of his mugshot. But over the last 48 hours, he has posted a dozen times, promoting his interview with Musk and sharing messaging related to his campaign.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2024
Jake Schneider, the Republican National Committee’s rapid response director, heralded Trump for gaining “nearly a million new followers after his first X posts in nearly a year.”
Even with those numbers, Dahan said he doesn’t see Trump leaving Truth Social entirely for X any time soon.
“Truth Social is more of a place where he has his core base that he’s talking to and interacting with,” Dahan said. “Truth can evolve to fill in the gaps that X isn’t filling, perhaps.”
With orders of magnitude more users than Truth Social, X still has a unique ability to amplify Trump’s messages.
“Look, I love Trump on Twitter,” an unnamed Trump confidant told The Bulwark. “But one of the advantages on Truth Social was that nobody was on there and he could say basically whatever he wanted and a lot of the problematic stuff just didn’t get seen. Now we’re back to old times.”
Dahan suggested that mobilization and get-out-the-vote efforts could still be effectively targeted on Truth Social, given its audience of fervent Trump supporters.
“They’re more engaged. They’re more likely to show up to events than your average X follower,” he said. “X is built around a function. Truth is really built around a community…That’s what I think it’ll continue to evolve into.”
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