Former president Donald Trump almost defected from Truth Social to join a rival platform called Gettr launched by former aide Jason Miller, a Washington Post report has revealed.
The report detailed the meeting Mr Trump had with the co-founders of his post-presidential startup Trump Media & Technology Group — Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss — while also pondering a competing offer from Mr Miller who met the former president on 11 June last year, a day that came to be called the “meltdown” day by the founders of Truth Social.
Mr Miller’s final offer to Mr Trump for joining the conservative app included $100m — and potentially more — over five years to post on Gettr, the people familiar with the episode told the Washington Post.
But finally, the former president stayed with Truth Social, a decision that he has indicated to allies he is stuck with now, according to the report.
According to traffic analysis group Similarweb, in September, Truth Social had fewer than 1.7 million monthly unique visitors in the United States -- much lower than the websites for the crypto news source CoinDesk, the drugstore chain CVS Health and the internal job-listing page for Walmart, the report said.
On the contrary, Twitter had more than 184 million monthly unique visitors in the United States in the same month. If Mr Trump decides to launch his presidential bid, he will need a larger audience which Truth Social doesn’t provide.
“Trump has told his allies that he can’t leave Truth Social, because he’s propping it up, and he doesn’t want a site so closely associated with his brand to collapse,” the Post reported.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, had stated that he would reinstate Mr Trump’s account although the former president said he would not return even if he was invited back.
“If I choose to run, I will only use Truth,” Mr Trump told Fox News on the day after Mr Musk officially took over Twitter. “When I put out a Truth, it is all over the place.” The platform feels “like home,” he said, and he likes “the way it works”.
Last year, if Mr Trump had defected from Truth Social, it would have triggered a meltdown of everything that Mr Litinsky and Mr Moss had created. The WaPo report says that “Trump Media lawyers scrambled to mount a counterattack, according to people familiar with the episode”.
The Trump Media & Technology Group’s co-founders wrote in their daily log about Trump’s possible defection: “Would Trump really ‘do a side deal’?”
Company whistleblower Will Wilkerson shared the internal documents with the government and the WaPo reporters.
Shannon Devine, Trump Media spokesperson, responded by saying that the “Washington Post’s obsessive series of conspiracy theories about Truth Social read like the jealous projections of a failing newspaper because the Post is, in fact, a failing newspaper envious of our undeniable popularity”.
Last month, Google added the Truth Social app back to Play Store nearly two months after it banned it due to a violation of its content moderation policies.
“On 19 August we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play,” a Google spokesperson said.
