• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

As of June 3, President Donald Trump had posted 2,262 times to Truth Social in the132 days since his inauguration. That’s 17 posts per day -- or night.

According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the president’s social media use is far exceeding his posting in his first term: “His posting now overshadows even the most explosive Twitter days of his first presidency: He tweeted 14 times on his biggest-posting day in early 2017, the data show -- a tenth of the 138 posts his Truth Social account sent on a single day this March.”

According to the White House, this is a good thing: “President Trump is the most transparent president in history and is meeting the American people where they are to directly communicate his policies, message, and important announcements,” said White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers.

Transparent? I suppose, as in Saran Wrap transparency  -- only a few microns thick and unable to stand on its own. But the biggest problem with Trump’s brand of social media transparency is that it is a pinball type of presidentialism --  continually launching projectiles just to see what they bump into.

Here’s how this scenario often plays out. Trump sends out many of his missives in the middle of the night. They are posted to Truth Social, the media platform he owns and which he is contractually obligated to post first on.

In terms of comparison, X has almost 600 million users, Truth Social has about 1% of that -- about 6 million. And that is hardly a diverse sampling. Los Angeles Times reporter Lorraine Ali dared to spend 24 hours on Truth Social last year, “so you don’t have to.” She found Truth Social to be like “a MAGA town hall in a ventless conference room, where an endless line of folks step up to the mic to share how the world is out to get them.”

Ali went on: “The Truth Social feed I experienced was a mix of swaggering gun talk, typo-filled Bible scripture, violent Biden bashing, nonsensical conspiracy theories and more misguided memes about Jan. 6 'hostages,' trans satanists and murderous migrants than anyone should be subjected to in one day. Or ever.”

This is the audience that is the first stop for Trump’s midnight social media musings. Truth Social is not the place for thoughtful policy statements or carefully crafted communication. Rather, it is a place that laps up posts like the beaut that Trump launched on Memorial Day, which started with: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds, who allowed 21,000,000 million people to illegally enter our country, many of them being criminals and the mentally insane.”

He then shortly followed that up by reposting this: “There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. >#Democrats don’t know the difference.”

From Truth Social, his posts rapidly move to more mainstream platforms. The Post article plotted the typical course of a Trump “Truth”: "'His messaging moves in real time from Truth to X, and it spreads just as far if not farther on X than it did when he was tweeting himself on the platform,’ said Darren Linvill, a professor and co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University who studies social media.

"What’s more, Truth Social’s almost exclusively congenial audience insulates the president from negative responses. ‘His current social media behavior suggests that with time he has been pulled even farther into his own echo chambers,’ Linvill said. ‘Truth Social gives him complete and constant positive feedback.’”

By the time dawn breaks over the White House, these missives have been echoing through the echo chambers of social media for at least a couple of hours. Trump has received endorsements from the Truth Social crowd and the posts are out in the world, demanding to be dealt with.

This is not even government by fiat. It’s as if you woke from a fever dream at 3 in the morning and decided that the two-headed dragon eating your Froot Loops needed to be taken out by an all-out military operation. And you were the president. And you could make it happen. And the Two-Headed Dragon was Iran --  or Greenland  -- or Canada.

It is a quantum leap beyond insane that this is how government policy is currently being determined. Even more unbelievable is the fact that this has now been normalized by the same White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, who said “President Trump was elected in a historic landslide victory and even won the popular vote — no further validation is needed.”

OMG.  No, Taylor, further validation is needed. Desperately! These posts are determining the future of the world and everyone who lives in it. They should be given great thought. Or at least more thought than that generated by the mind-altering aftereffects of a Big Mac eaten at 1:30 in the morning.