Ever he was kicked off most of social media — including Twitter, his favorite, for all eternity — Donald Trump has threatened to start his own online platform. It seemed far-fetched, if not impossible. To run one requires a lot of bandwidth, which he probably can’t get, or at least a lot of money, which he probably doesn’t have. But lo and behold, on Tuesday, he debuted his great idea. And it was just a blog. That only he could access.
It appears to be called “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” and all it is is a place to dump the press releases he’s been releasing over the last couple months — the ones that are clearly just what would have been tweets, typos and random all-caps and all, placed below formal-looking letterhead. That quickie diss of Mitt Romney in which he calls him a “stone cold loser” that he would have fired off at 3am? It’s here instead.
You can repost Trump’s posts on Twitter or Facebook, but there’s no way to interact with them on his special social media site. It’s a pretty elegant reflection of his own isolation, down in Mar-a-Lago, ranting to strangers about the election he lost half a year back.
When news broke of the platform, a lot of people, including us, compared it to a blog. But others had another, even older comparison: He’d just reinvented LiveJournal, the diary site that took off in the early days of the internet after it took off with the public. Founded in 1999, it came well before the term “blog” was born, and it allowed users to blather about their thoughts and dreams and grievances. It even allowed you to list you general mood, like “angry” or “feeling excited.”
Trump’s site doesn’t have those, but it does have lots of grievances. Still, when it launched, everyone made the same LiveJournal joke.
Alternate headline: Trump has started an off-brand LiveJournal. https://t.co/ec5iebGyCN
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) May 4, 2021
https://twitter.com/AnnieLinskey/status/1389707103875571712
Back in my day, we actually had apps that were essentially just press releases and you could list your current music and it was called LiveJournal and it was wonderful.
— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) May 5, 2021
https://twitter.com/AriMelber/status/1389688232808435716
Trump could have saved time and money and just opened a LiveJournal account. https://t.co/WeQk9T9bgA
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) May 4, 2021
Imagine, if you will, a social network so exclusive, so elite, that only one lonely old man can even post on it. Now open your eyes… https://t.co/FPtfuPxQIP
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) May 4, 2021
https://twitter.com/MrIanMacIntyre/status/1389680414198009856
Does Donald J. Trump even know what LiveJournal is? Did he have an account that we haven’t discovered yet? He seems to have only discovered the Internet when Twitter came around, allowing succinct, rapid-fire posts. But perhaps he’ll expand the capabilities of his newfangled sosical media site, and we’ll really learn about his dreams and his feelings.