Trump shuts down ‘Desk’ blog after less than a month, hints at social media comeback

Former US President Donald Trump has shuttered his ‘From the Desk Of’ page, a blog of sorts where he posted statements resembling his famous tweets. The move is a precursor for Trump’s return to social media, an aide said.

Corporate media outlets who pretended not to care about Trump’s blog noticed it was gone on Wednesday morning. When reached for comment, the 45th president’s senior aide Jason Miller confirmed the Desk was gone and “will not be returning.”

As the online Resistance did victory laps over the demise of Trump’s “sad little blog” (Daily Beast), Miller explained that it was “just auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on,” according to an email sent to CNBC.

Later, responding to a journalist speculating that the move was a “precursor” to Trump joining another social media platform, he said “Yes, actually, it is.”

The Desk lasted less than a month, having first appeared on May 4. It did not come close to rivaling Trump’s former presence on Twitter, where at one point he had accumulated over 88 million followers. It did, however, offer him an opportunity to make his voice heard after getting banned by Twitter and every other Big Tech corporation back in January, when he was still a sitting president.

The bans were extended to the Desk as well, with an account dedicated to re-posting his statements getting removed on May 5, after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was brigaded by thousands of angry Democrats insisting he needs to “#RemoveTrumpJack.” 

There was some confusion as to whether the Desk was the new social media platform Miller said Trump was planning to either launch or join. A promotional video introducing the blog called it a “beacon of freedom” and a “place to speak freely and safely” – but that apparently applied only to Trump himself, as no one else could sign up, post or comment.

Miller then tweeted a clarification that the Desk was “not a new social media platform” but instead a resource to find his latest statements and “highlights from his first term in office.” 

Trump had leveraged social media platforms in 2016 to bring his message directly to the American people, bypassing corporate media gatekeepers who had near-universally endorsed his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. His personal Twitter account had over 88 million followers at one point during his presidency, and was declared a “designated public square” by a federal judge in May 2018, as part of a lawsuit by his critics to force the sitting president to unblock them. 

That did not stop Twitter from “permanently suspending” Trump in January, citing concerns about how his statements were “being received and interpreted on and off Twitter.” Siding with the Democrats, who declared the January 6 riot at the US Capitol an “insurrection” that was “incited” by Trump, other social media platforms followed suit. YouTube has gone so far as to ban “the voice of Donald Trump,” censoring a video in which he was interviewed. 

The crackdown was not limited to Trump and his supporters, either. Parler, a Twitter alternative they embraced in droves in January, found itself expelled from Google and Apple app stores and denied Amazon cloud services, forcing it offline. Another platform, Gab, was accused of anti-Semitism, denied banking and payment processing services under media pressure, and hacked – with user data then shared with corporate media outlets.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!