Former President Donald Trump is “attention-starved” after being deplatformed for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, and his social media bans have hampered his ability to fundraise. According to Yahoo News, talks about buying stakes in other conservative social media outlets have faltered, leaving Trump struggling to launch a social media platform. The twice-impeached one-term president has been teasing his followers with the possibility of a 2024 presidential run. Still, he doesn’t have much of a voice on social media, except for releasing statements through his spokesperson Liz Harrington to circumvent his Twitter ban.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the former president even considered selling his name and expansive base of followers from his now-defunct Twitter account to some of the platforms.
“The former president is interested in being paid in exchange for the followers he would presumably bring to the new social networks, people familiar with the situation said. Mr. Trump had nearly 89 million Twitter followers,” the outlet reported. “He’s not that interested in equity. One person familiar with the process told the outlet, he wants cash money up front, like a license fee.
After being shunned by social media sites for inciting the attack on the Capitol, the former president launched a blog in an endeavor that only lasted for just under a month. Trump reportedly didn’t like being mocked over his blog, and it wasn’t getting much traffic, so he shut it down.
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Trump’s headline-grabbing tweets are a thing of the past as the social media behemoth determined that they had to “permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Trump really thought his tweets were something — perhaps edgy. The greatest tweets in the world. And now he has nothing after he incited his followers to attack our country’s democracy to stop the peaceful transition of power after being defeated by President Joe Biden in the electoral and popular vote.
As for Trump wanting cash up front, that’s up for speculation, but he is under investigation, and deadly insurrections aren’t as popular as he probably thought.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
