Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
Do you remember what it was like when Donald Trump couldn’t stop tweeting? When it felt like, no matter the time of day or what you were doing, his caps-lock emeses were going to find you, like a heat-seeking, plain-text missile? Enjoying a nice little morning at the farmer’s market? Hold on, here’s a push alert about Trump calling Kim Jong Un “rocket man” on Twitter. Turn on the radio, and you’d hear somebody recapping his digital burbles. You could probably make the case that a large portion of the words spoken on cable-news panels from 2015 to early 2021 were at least tangentially about things that Trump pecked onto his smartphone from a reclining position.
Then January 6 happened. Twitter, worried about “the risk of further incitement of violence,” permanently suspended his account, and Trump later launched his own social-media site, Truth Social. It has far fewer users than its rivals do, and Trump now mostly bleats into the void. Occasionally, news outlets will surface one of his posts—or “Truths,” as they’re called—such as a September 12 post declaring that he would not debate Kamala Harris again. But although Elon Musk has reinstated Trump’s X account, the former president still mostly posts on Truth Social, which has had the effect of containing his wildest content. Unless you’re a die-hard Trump supporter, a journalist, or an obsessive political hobbyist, you’re likely not getting that regular glimpse into the Republican candidate’s brain. But … maybe you should be?
Last Friday, I received an email with a link to a website created by a Washington, D.C.–based web developer named Chris Herbert. The site, Trump’s Truth, is a searchable database collecting all of Trump’s Truth Social posts, even those that have been deleted. Herbert has also helpfully transcribed every speech and video Trump has posted on the platform, in part so that they can be indexed more easily by search engines such as Google. Thus, Trump’s ravings are more visible.
Like many reporters, I’d been aware that the former president’s social-media posts had, like his rally speeches, grown progressively angrier, more erratic, and more bizarre in recent years. Having consumed enough Trump rhetoric over the past decade to melt my frontal cortex, I’ve grown accustomed to his addled style of communication. And yet, I still wasn’t adequately prepared for the immersive experience of scrolling through hundreds of his Truths and ReTruths. Even for Trump, this feed manages to shock. In the span of just a few days, you can witness the former president sharing flagrantly racist memes about Middle Easterners invading America, falsely edited videos showing Harris urging migrants to cross the border, an all-caps screed about how much better off women would be under his presidency, a diatribe about Oprah’s recent interview with Harris. It’s a lot to take in at once: Trump calling an MSNBC anchor a “bimbo,” a declaration of hatred for Taylor Swift, a claim that he “saved Flavored Vaping in 2019.”
On their own, each of these posts is concerning and more than a little sad. But consumed in the aggregate, they take on a different meaning, offering a portrait of a man who appears frequently incoherent, internet-addicted, and emotionally volatile—even by the extreme standard that Trump has already set. Trump seems unable to stop reposting pixelated memes from anonymous accounts with handles such as @1776WeThePeople1776 and @akaPR0B0SS, some of which contain unsettling messages such as a desire to indict sitting members of Congress for sedition. Trump appears to go on posting jags, sometimes well after midnight, rattling off Truths multiple times a minute. On Sunday night, from 6:20 p.m. to 6:26 p.m., Trump shared 20 different posts from conservative news sites, almost all without commentary. For a man currently engaged in the homestretch of campaigning for the presidency of the United States, he is prolific on social media, and seemingly unable to stop posting—from Friday to Monday, Trump posted or reposted 82 times.
Back in January, my colleague McKay Coppins argued that politically engaged Americans should go to a Trump rally and “listen to every word of the Republican front-runner’s speech” as “an act of civic hygiene.” Granted, Coppins wrote his article during a different time in the election cycle, at a moment when Trump was less visible, but his point still stands. Many Americans and the institutions that cover him have grown so used to Trump—to his tirades, lies, and buffoonery—that his behavior can fade into the background of our cultural discourse, his shamelessness and unfitness for office taken almost for granted. When Coppins attended a rally early this year, he recalled the “darker undercurrent” that infused Trump’s rhetoric and lurked behind many of the comments coming from supporters in the crowd. Just as important, Coppins wrote, the rally was also a reminder that “Trump is no longer the cultural phenomenon he was in 2016. Yes, the novelty has worn off. But he also seems to have lost the instinct for entertainment that once made him so interesting to audiences.”
Trump’s Truth Social posts offer a similar vibe. His feed is bleak, full of posts about America in decline. Aesthetically, it is ugly, full of doctored images and screenshots of screenshots of Facebook-style memes. Consuming a few weeks’ worth of his posts at once was enough to make me feel awful about the state of the world, not unlike how it feels to visit seedy message boards such as 4chan.
And then there’s the prose. As in his rallies, Trump rambles, his writing hard to follow. His stylistic choice to use caps lock for many of his longer posts gives the appearance that he is shouting. Unlike on Twitter, where he was constrained by character limits, Trump’s missives are too long and too convoluted to be easily digestible by aggregating media organizations. In previous iterations, Trump’s tweets were sometimes so bizarre as to be funny (or at least weird enough to be compelling); now his posts appear too fueled by grievance to be casually amusing.
I realize that I’m not exactly selling the experience of taking a spin through Trump’s digital archive of incoherence. But I think it’s an instructive exercise. If you, like me, have had the experience of seeing friends or loved ones radicalized online or lost to a sea of Facebook memes and propaganda, then scrolling through Trump’s Truth Social posts will provoke a familiar feeling. On his own website, Trump doesn’t just appear unfit for the highest office in the land; he seems small, embittered, and under the influence of the kind of online outrage that usually consumes those who have been or feel alienated by broad swaths of society. It’s not (just) that Trump seems unpresidential—it’s that he seems like an unwell elderly man posting AI slop for an audience of bots on Facebook. Imagine that, instead of Donald Trump’s, you were looking at the feed of a relative. What would you say or do? Whom would you call?
A few months ago, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote about the media’s “bias toward coherence” when it comes to Trump’s rhetoric, where, in an attempt to make sense of Trump’s nonsense, journalists sand down the candidate’s rough edges. Perusing Trump’s Truth Social feed, though, it is nearly impossible to find any coherence to latch on to. Since Trump came down his golden escalator in 2015, I’ve thought that the best way to understand the candidate is via plain text. There, unlike on television, his fragmented attention, peculiar thinking, and dangerous words cannot hide or be explained away. The election is 41 days away, and Trump appears as unstable as ever. But don’t take my word for it: Go see for yourself.