In an interview that aired as part of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Friday night, former President Donald Trump complained that Twitter — which removed him from its platform earlier this year after the Capitol violence — is “boring,” adding that press releases he has been putting out throughout recent weeks are “much more elegant.” Trump distinguished himself while on Twitter with his often crude remarks including a long list of petulant nicknames for his political opponents — pretending like he is in any position to speak with authority on what’s “elegant” is laughable.
After Hannity described the former president as “cancelled off Twitter,” Trump ranted as follows:
‘I’m really getting the big word out because we’re doing releases. Every time I do a release, it’s all over the place. It’s better than Twitter, much more elegant than Twitter. And Twitter now is very boring. A lot of people are leaving Twitter. Twitter is becoming very, very boring.’
In reality, it seems safe to suspect that Trump’s press releases have had a lower reach than his past tweets, although part of that apparent shift is no doubt because of the fact that he’s no longer the president. The percentage of 15-second segments on cable news that mention Trump has recently fallen to a level on par with the amount of coverage that Trump was getting in late 2015 — before he entered the White House and before he even became the Republican presidential nominee. Overall, total minutes in which Trump’s face was seen on cable news coverage recently sunk to the lowest level since June 2015, even farther in the past.
In the Hannity interview that aired this week, Trump added a familiarly preposterous claim that Twitter was “like a failed thing” before he joined. As he dubiously put it:
‘When I started with Twitter years ago, it was like a failed thing, concept, media platform. It was failed. And it became exciting. And I think I had a lot to do with it, to be honest with you. It became very exciting. And now it is boring. And it’s no good anymore.’
There’s just no systematic evidence for the grandiose story that Trump was telling — instead, it seems like another example of his familiar self-centered delusion. By all appearances, Twitter is doing just fine.
