Former President Trump is returning to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, in an attempt to grow his following as he loses support to his new opponent, Vice President Harris.
Between Sunday morning and Tuesday evening, Trump posted 18 times on a range of topics to his 90 million followers on the site.
The former president has used the site to blast Ms. Harris on issues ranging from inflation to fracking to the Middle East, at times calling her Comrade Kamala. In one letter, he complained that Ms. Harris “has served in one of the worst presidencies in history, and is certainly the worst Vice President.”
In another message, he wrote in his trademark capital letters: “November 5th will be the most important day in American history!”
The series of posts evokes tweets from Trump’s time in office, when entire news cycles revolved around the then-president’s musings.
“His return to this platform signals Trump’s all-out effort to once again go on the offensive to control the tone and tempo of the race,” said Kevin Madden, a veteran Republican strategist who served as a senior aide to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “The X Platform is where Trump will shift the media’s attention with every tweet.”
“The clicks he gains there send signals to his supporters about his core message and drive additional media coverage by print, broadcast and cable news outlets,” Madden said. “He initiates and then controls the media message cycle himself.”
But a lot has changed in the years since, much of which came during Trump’s absence from Twitter.
Trump’s posts in recent days have garnered less attention than they did earlier, so it’s unclear whether they will have the same impact on the political system.
The former president returned to the platform, formerly known as Twitter, on August 12, ahead of an interview with X owner Elon Musk. Trump, who was banned from the platform following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, had posted just once since his account was reinstated in November 2022.
For the past two and a half years, Trump has posted on Truth Social, a platform he founded after being banned from numerous social media sites following the Capitol storming.
However, he boasts a much larger audience on X, with 90 million followers compared to Truth Social’s 7.6 million.
Madden said Trump spent the final month of the campaign on the defensive, from Harris’s lead to the Democratic National Convention.
“When comparing Harris’ media coverage in national and local markets to Trump’s, Harris has received far more attention than Trump,” Madden said. “Trump’s success to date, particularly in the 2016 and 2024 primaries, is directly related to his ability to block attention from his opponents and control the amount of media coverage in his favor.”
The Trump campaign said the former president’s use of X was part of a comprehensive outreach campaign to the public.
“While Kamala Harris continues to hide from the press, President Trump is delivering the messenger of victory directly to the American people, whenever and wherever he wants,” Caroline Sunshine, deputy communications director for the Trump campaign, said, adding that a recent stream on X had surpassed 2 billion views and “set the internet ablaze.”
“These numbers and RFK Jr. [Tulsi] “Gabbard believes President Trump is winning over new voters and gaining momentum in this race,” she said.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a campaign halt on Friday and endorsed Trump. Ms. Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, has also endorsed Mr. Trump.
Musk’s interview with President Trump earlier this month was plagued by technical issues: the event was delayed by more than 40 minutes due to technical issues, which Musk claimed were due to a “massive” denial of service attack.
Susan Del Percio, a veteran Republican strategist, said Trump’s reemergence on social media platforms was notable, as she framed it as part of a broader effort by both sides to reach out to voters in the final stages of the campaign.
X has undergone changes over the past year since Musk bought it, but it’s “kind of come back into the mainstream,” she said.
Del Percio said Trump is clearly aware that Harris “is very active on social media, particularly TikTok,” and that so far she “has not used it as an effective tool.”
“He’s using it as a rant, not as a tool to win the election,” she said.
Since taking over from President Biden as the Democratic candidate of the future, Harris has capitalized on the online frenzy surrounding her campaign, aggressively using the “brat” and “coconut tree” memes that became popular as Democrats endorsed the vice president.
“Not long ago, Trump was running against a sitting president, but now Harris is clearly the candidate for change, the new candidate,” said Joshua Tucker, a political science professor and co-director of the Center on Social Media and Politics at New York University.
“She’s new. Her internet strategy with the coconut memes and stuff like that is new and exciting,” he added. “He’s no longer the candidate for change in this election.”
Tucker said Trump’s decision to return to the platform was both politically and financially motivated: Trump has invested heavily in Truth Social, holding a stake worth about $2 billion that he cannot sell until late September due to a six-month no-sale clause.
Tucker suggested that he no longer believes that using X is hurting his platform’s popularity, or that he may have given up on success.
“I think the reason he’s coming back to Twitter is because he believes at this point that the political benefits of returning to Twitter outweigh the financial costs he might incur by not returning to Twitter and dedicating himself more to Truth Social,” Tucker said.
Since returning to X, Trump has continued to post on Truth Social, and even now, he appears to be more active on his platform than he is on X.
“While President Trump has the right to post different types of messages on other platforms, Truth Social is proud to serve as a venue for his voice online,” Truth Social spokesperson Shannon Devine said in a statement to The Hill.
Tucker warned that the former president might not get the political boost he was hoping for from returning to X, saying his comments have already been made available to supporters and media on Truth Social and it could evoke “a feeling of trying to relive some of his greatest hits from the past.”
Trump is seen by both Republicans and Democrats as a kind of brand-builder who skillfully uses social media, but his campaign against Harris is different from previous ones, especially with the condensed schedule.
“Now that there are less than 70 days left, we’ll see if it works out the same for him,” Madden said.
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