Musk’s Move on Twitter Spells More Trouble for Trump’s Truth Social

E lon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion, so that he can make it “the platform for free speech around the globe.” Twitter, he explained in his letter to the board, can “neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form,” and thus “needs to be transformed as a private company.”

Why would he bother when we have Truth Social?

I ask in jest, but the question is on one level a serious one. On February 21, Donald Trump launched his new social-media platform, Truth Social, promising that it would be a “big tent” that “encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology.” That afternoon, I signed up for an account so that I could see what it was all about, and was immediately placed onto a waiting list. Two months later, I’m still on that list.

I am not unique. Almost everyone else who signed up is in exactly the same limbo. Why? Because, despite being based upon a piece of open-source software, Truth Social seems to be vaporware — the Duke Nukem Forever of the social-media market.

How could Donald Trump have gotten this so wrong? Who are we kidding? Trump always gets this stuff wrong. The same guy who managed to bankrupt a casino is also incapable of deploying a GitHub repository on which all the hard work has already been done. Plus ça change.

Given Twitter’s size, the prospects for Truth Social were always limited. But, by delaying as long as it has, the Trump Media & Technology Group has made its path much harder than it should have been. Now, it may be dead before it has begun. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Musk succeeds in buying Twitter, that the deal is completed within a reasonable time frame, and that, by prompting the company’s more hysterical employees to flee in horror, he manages to effect some meaningful change to its culture. Where does that leave Trump’s project? Truth Social wasn’t a mere whim or a piece of ill-considered bar-talk; it’s a real company, with 400,000 names on that waiting list and a CEO, Devin Nunes, who left Congress to lead it. And, despite all this, it’s nowhere.

Donald Trump achieved a lot as president, but almost none of it can be truthfully described as his own work. His tax bill was written by Paul Ryan and shepherded through Congress by a Republican Party that had prepared for the opportunity for a decade. His three Supreme Court Justices were selected by the Federalist Society and their confirmation was managed from start to finish by Senator McConnell. His regulatory reform was a part of the routine back and forth that the legislature’s abdication has made a feature of every change in administration. He declined to read his briefs, he refused to prepare for his debates, and he never quite seemed to grasp that the job involved more than picking stupid fights on Twitter. Notably, the issues on which he did break the mold — immigration, for example — ended up as an administrative afterthought. Despite his bluster, he waited to ask Congress for the funds to build his wall until after the GOP had lost control of the House.

This chronic dilettantism has marked Trump’s post-presidency, too. Sure, he occasionally gives off the impression of activity, by issuing an unhinged press release or making a half-assed endorsement, but insofar as he engages in anything concrete, his attentions seem limited to relitigating the election he lost back in 2020. Say what you will about the man, but this is not a criticism that could be made of Elon Musk. Like Trump, Musk has a short attention span. Unlike Trump, this serves Musk well. Over the years, Musk has moved from being interested in Zip2 (sold for $307 million) to being interested in X.com (the bank that eventually become PayPal) to being interested in SpaceX to being interested in Tesla to being interested in NeuraLink to being interested in The Boring Company to, for now at least, being interested in Twitter. Over the same period, Donald Trump has largely remained interested in . . . well, Donald Trump — and, even then, he could not muster up the necessary discipline to win a presidential election against a semi-comatose Joe Biden.

This month, both Trump and Musk are hoping to change the social-media landscape for the better. Given their respective track records, I know which one my money is on: the one who wasn’t — and, indeed, can’t be — the president of the United States.