The Trump Blog
I’ve just realized that in the several months since Donald Trump has left the White House and Joe Biden has taken the helm of our tattered democracy, I have written very little that qualifies as political in content (only two in 2021). I’m sure some of my readers are happy about that and the rest are just satisfied in being less on the edge of their chair every moment with an even-keeled president versus a “stable genius”. I have been writing this blog now since February, 2019 when my son Thomas told me I should do a blog to put my stories out there. Since then I have written and posted 975 stories (not including the several that I have had to delete by virtue of some offense taken by someone). 1,000 of anything is a big number. At an average 1,300 words, that is almost 1.3 million words or 14 full-length books’ worth. That represents on average about 2,000 hours of my time, which equals about a year’s worth of work at 40 hours/week. In my first banking job I used to keep track of my client visits very diligently and when that number got to 1,000, I decided it was time to stop tracking them. The tracking is done by the blog application, which makes available all manner of statistics for me to analyze my audience penetration. What a shame it can’t qualitatively rate my stories so I can at least see whether my writing has gotten better over all that time and effort. I have to just assume that it has.
I suppose I should give a fleeting thought as to whether there is any value to continuing to write my blog stories, but I have already decided that I will continue to write them and that there is no metric that would cause me to stop. I simply do not have a specific performance goal with the blog so I don’t even bother looking at the stats about who reads it or not. I would like to have a broader audience, but I am unwilling to do the marketing and promotional work that naturally leads to that sort of broadening. I also know that with a broader audience come other problems like untoward comments and people who take offense at something I write and let me know so directly. I don’t wish for more of that in my life, not because my skin is thin, but because I dislike upsetting people. People say that if you have nothing good to say, don’t say anything. But they don’t tell you that what you think is good or at least inoffensive is not always the way the subject of your comment (intended, implied, inadvertent or positively unconnected) takes them. C’est la Guerre.
But I write for my own purposes, which is the best way to approach anything. I want to get better at writing and the only way to do that is to write and write and write. I also need something productive to do with my excess time and I can think of nothing that suits me and that purpose better than writing. Reading is good, but for me, writing is better. I take great pleasure in finding specific ideas, research-unearthed facts and connected facts that are not so obviously connected. I have a need to express myself and yet I know that my verbal storytelling can be either inconvenient or simply too much in polite company. People want to hear someone’s thoughts and opinions only so much. The beauty of writing a blog is that the audience is totally voluntary. People can choose to follow your blog or not. They can pick and choose how often they read your stories or not. I have a dear friend from college who says quite directly that he reads the first part of each story and then determines if the topic is of interest to him and either carries on or clicks off. That is fine with me. Even I find some of my stories really good and interesting and others much less so. I do like to think I will not put out anything that does not fit my standard, but I cannot swear that I am the best arbiter of that.
When Donald Trump got banned from most social media sites, ostensibly for perpetrating and perpetuating the “Big Lie” about him really winning the 2020 election, we all gave a sigh of relief and had a sense that he would not just fade into the night, but would find other outlets for his outrageous views. About a month ago, 29 days to be exact, Trump launched his blog and his newest outlet to replace his social media accounts that were shuttered. Nobody ever suggested that a blog is as leading edge as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but what seemed to work with 140 characters (now raised to a 280 limit) seems less compelling as a full-fledged blog. It may say that the attention span of the Trump base does not extend much beyond 140 characters and soundbite politics. It may also say that what the Donald has to say simply doesn’t hold up in longer prose and lacks the impact that his sound bites had. Donald got used to his 35 million followers on Twitter and the paltry traffic of 1,500 – 2,000 visitors that would share his thoughts seems to have embarrassed him. I’m watching the Netflix series called Halston, which is ostensibly about brand management. If Halston put out a branded product that flopped, it detracted from the entire brand. When Trump’s words don’t create buzz and don’t get sent into the viral ozone, his whole aura of relevance gets dented.
There is also the tightrope that Trump needs to walk right now with the legal system. He is clearly under mounting pressure from NYC, NYS, Fulton County and any number of civil actions filed against him from every imaginable direction. His problems are both civil and criminal now and his legal bills, even though available to be defrayed by his fundraising, are surely mounting into the stratosphere. This at a time when his core businesses are failing left and right and even the ability to move or liquify assets linked to his brand make for a difficult sale. But the legal issue that seems most imperiled at the moment by his blog is the pending 400 or so cases of the insurrectionists under indictment for the January 6th attack on the Capital. While several of those are pleading out, others are remaining imprisoned without bail and the judges ruling on those issues are regularly citing the Trump blog as handy evidence of the perpetuation of the Big Lie that stoked the flames of insurrection in the first place. The more Trump’s words keep hurting these insurrectionists, the more they will continue to cite him as the instigator of their actions. They are already mostly claiming that they did no wrong because they were following the orders of the ruling commander-in-chief. That is a thorny wicket for Trump and his lawyers certainly know it. It was just a matter of time before someone on Trump’s staff and/or legal team convinced him that the blog was doing far more harm than good…in addition to making him look puny in his squeaky little blog voice.
Trump made the right call shutting down his blog. It should never have been launched as a tactical matter. The man’s life has ceased to be his own at this stage and I predict that rather than reinstatement in August as he and Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn suggest, he will be looking at indictments of meaningful proportions by August. By then he may need to reactivate his blog just to put all his efforts forward on a revitalized legal fundraising push.
I write a blog for no particular reason other than my pleasure. Trump wrote a blog for too many reasons. Blogs are like pets. If you spawn them for targeted reasons of self-interest, they are bound to bite you in the ass sooner rather than later.