His acknowledgement may have arrived 57 days late, but his assessment was spot on. "Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!" observed Trump on New Year's Day in one his otherwise crackpot epistolaries to his Truth Socialists.
Updated just six days ago, his readership stats are from the social-media ranking site Search Logistics, which further informs us that all such platforms "will show you whatever content they need to keep" their audiences, adding, even if that content doesn’t necessarily tell the truth.
Well, I guess that pussy cat is out of the bag. I'd estimate Truth Social's ratio of untruths to truths at 20,000:1, the lone digit representing his candid admission that with him as president-elect the United States is now a disastrous laughingstock (which he misspelled, of course). Alternative interpretations are welcome. Good luck.
Other than Trump's extravagant falsehoods — which I concede are interesting reading for the morbidly inclined (moi) — what's striking about Truth Social, owned, operated and written, so to speak, by the world's most powerful human menace, is its minuscule readership. Two million? Peanuts, President Carter would have said, considering a South African neo-Nazi's site has in the neighborhood of 450 million.
The question is to be asked: Yes, but once Trump is officially the world's most powerful menace, will his site not swell in numbers? Social Logistics answers: "It's clear the platform faces challenges in expanding beyond its core audience." One reason is provided in this post's second sentence: Truth Social is crap from a crackpot.
There are other reasons. Seventy-five percent of Americans "didn’t recognise the brand at all" in a 2022 survey, and "of the 25% of respondents who recognised Truth Social, only 16% said they liked [it]"; "only 7% of people aged 18 to 34 [the prime market for social media] said they plan to use Truth Social often"; and among Democrats, "1% said they would use it."
So here's a site that is massively unread and scarcely followed (there's also a massive difference between readers and followers), yet this unrenowned chamber pot of bottomless falsehoods has enlarged Trump's net worth by hundreds of millions of dollars. Hence another question asked, again by Search Logistics: "How much money does Truth Social make?" Its answer: "None."
The void is both emblematic of Trump's serial business failures (while enriching himself at others' expense) and deeply symbolic of his jibjabbing political rot. Our country, a disaster? Much like his first term, he's inheriting from a Democratic president a healthy economy: GDP growth, millions of new jobs, higher wages, fallen inflation and near-historic low unemployment.
And he's about to blow it all up — again, just like his first term. Trump was just clever enough then to avoid tampering with President Obama's stellar turnaround of a typically ruinous Republican economy, until an atypical event dropped in his lap. None called his gross mishandling of the pandemic something to laugh about, however.
Now, all we can hope for, the very best we might dare anticipate, is that Trump perseveres in making America only a "laughingstock all over the world." To be regretted is that global laughter would come with domestic pain. Regretted, but deserved; pain, and lots of it, is what Americans voted for.
We on the pain-averse side will have to bear the other side's stupidity, which, I further hope, we can do without despairing. On that topic, it was a bit more than a month ago that I wrote a poem, my first-ever (and probably my last). As a lover of W.H. Auden's works, I chose the theme of his "September 1, 1939" — historically the world's most dreadful day, which he expressed brilliantly, as always, yet concluded, "May I ... / Show an affirming flame." Meaning resistance to despair.
Such was what I attempted in my own way. I titled the poem "2015-2025," for Auden had written of his "low and dishonest decade." He also used the words "negation and despair." These two phrases I lifted from his "1939," both of them perfect in descriptive usefulness concerning our own years.
For those of you with a poetic bent or just an interest in verse forms — something I developed only while contemplating which of their innumerable variations to use — I adopted Auden's loose iambic trimeter but went with a construct known as a rondeau, commonly a poem of 13 lines, three stanzas, two separate rhymes, and in which the last line of the second and third stanzas repeat the first stanza's first line. Which produced this:
𝘈𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴
𝘈 𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦,
𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘸 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦
𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘪𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘯
𝘈 𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦.
𝘠𝘦𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘳𝘩𝘺𝘮𝘦𝘥
𝘚𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘯𝘰 𝘦𝘶𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘤 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘴
𝘈𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴.
𝘕𝘰 𝘸𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘰𝘯
𝘫𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘯𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳,
𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘸
𝘞𝘦 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘦
𝘈𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴.
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