As a candidate and president, Ronald Reagan frustrated liberals with his ability to resonate with the American people despite the media’s best efforts to undermine him.
Donald Trump had a similar style, but in Trump’s case, he had an advantage to appeal to the people: social media, and specifically Twitter. And Trump arguably rode that past the negative legacy media coverage to win the White House in 2016.
Yet now Trump banned forever from Twitter, after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, believes the platform is literally old news.
In an interview Friday with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Trump noted that his press releases carry as much, if not more, weight as his tweets once did.
“I’m really getting the big word out because we’re doing releases,” Trump said.
“And 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.”
When Twitter banned Trump, he had nearly 89 million followers.
And in true Trump fashion, he took credit for making the platform exciting when he still had the power to tweet.
“When I started with Twitter years ago, it was like a failed thing, concept, media platform. It was failed,” he told Hannity. Trump joined Twitter in 2009.
“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’s boring and it’s no good anymore.”
Trump’s spokesman, Jason Miller, made the same argument a month ago to Howard Kurtz of Fox News.
“His press releases, his statements, have actually been getting almost more play than he ever did on Twitter before,” Miller said.
And in some respect Miller was right.
For instance, much of the mainstream media – The Washington Post, Politico, Newsweek, CNN, to name a few – have reported on Trump’s endorsements for Republicans up for U.S. Senate seats in 2022.
Trump also told Hannity that he was still toying with creating his own social media network to rival Twitter.
“I’m looking at it. We’re looking at different platforms. We have a lot of people who want to come on existing platforms,” he said.
“They have to be strong. They can’t be dominated by Amazon and by Google and people that can take them off the air right away.”