Wednesday, June 02, 2021

Blogging Is Hard. I'm Better At It Than trump

I admit, it's hard to blog. When you have a full day of librarying, and then you gotta take care of stuff at home, and feed two cats, and play City Of Heroes on an underground server, THAT'S A FULL DAY'S WORK LAD AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT.

It's also hard to find topics or issues to blog about, especially during a wave of multitude issues - the abortion bans hitting every Red state, the Republican voter repression efforts, the Far Right threat of another insurrection riot, the ongoing immigrant fiasco, the pandemic, and finding a decent pair of pants at a Big & Tall store uh arguing over the merits of taxing the rich - that makes it hard to whittle it down to just one important enough to blog about.

So suffice to say it's a bit of an enjoyment to watch the likes of donald "bankrupt businessman" trump attempt to start a blog only to have it close down less than a month later.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Let's get a little more detail out of David Edwards at Raw Story (there may be a paywall):

Former President Donald Trump's blog was shut down on Wednesday and the internet's response was brutal...

"Trump's blog has been shut down permanently," Thomas Yantorno wrote. "Another failure in a endless list [of] failures, bankruptcies and financial losses. History will judge as the biggest loser in American history."

"No one cared about the Trump blog and its traffic was dismal at best," political commentator Ameshia Cross noted.

"Gosh, you'd think trump would've wanted his blog up and running for when he's *reinstated* in Aug. #Sad," another commenter joked.

"I've had kidney stones that lasted longer than Trumps blog...and they were more bearable," one Twitter user said...

When trump got banned from places like Twitter post-presidency, he promised to start his own online media outlet, one that would rival Twitter but dedicated to all things trump as he campaigned to lie his way back into the White House.

Instead, he paid some joker a ton of (other people's) money to start up a standard, run-of-the-mill website that offered blogging features and not much else.

As noted, the traffic to that site was meager... probably around the same level *I* get on a weekly basis (which is about 120-180 views per week that I know of). Thing is, I'm doing this shit for free, on my own time, I honestly don't care about the views - seriously, if it gets too high I worry I'm getting hit by spammers - and I ain't bragging about anything.

(beat)

Except for the 2020 SILVER PRIZE from the ROYAL PALM LITERARY AWARDS WHICH YOU CAN SEE TO THE RIGHT COLUMN OF THIS BLOG.

(grin)

There are a couple of observations to make here:

1) trump has no true tech savvy nor does anyone else around him. Nor did he have the means or funding to pull off a real tech startup to challenge existing Internet media formats. The people who sold him on this project were trying to get him to repackage a 2004 format for a 2021 audience, much like repackaging expired meat as fresh cuts.

2) trump's only skill was self-promotion through other media formats - Twitter, NBC faux-reality shows, Fox Not-News - where he didn't have to rely on his own platform. Twitter in many respects was perfect for him: all trump had to do was rage-tweet something in 280 characters that would be easy to digest for his followers and not involve a shit-ton of intellectual evaluation of the issue at hand. You can't do that on a blog.

3) trump as always over-promised and under-delivered. Trying to sell something on the cheap as something worth millions. Yet another business-based endeavor - that trump website was going to be his ground-floor to keep the money flowing in - that crashed and burned on trump for all to see. trump's broken casinos... his near-empty hotels (that DC hotel he used to violate the Emoluments Clause is up for sale (again))... his unwanted merch... that fraudulent university... everything started by him or taken over by him (YOU KILLED THE USFL, YOU FOOL) turned to shit and went bankrupt. And THIS is the model of "successful businessman" that the Republicans want to keep as their party leader?

trump has no true innovative idea to start anything good. trump has no real skill to adapt and improve when the moment calls for it.

trump's blog was a disaster from the get-go.

Just like everything trump tries to run himself.

Anybody still thinking trump is a successful person - the only success he ever had was getting too many people to believe his lies - is a goddamned fool.

Which is still a goddamned problem. More on that later.

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

I knew he could never make it as a blogger, he doesn't have the attention span for one thing, and the grift factor just isn't there.
Also, competition. With Twitter, people were already on it and all he had to do was piss them off enough to get them to pay attention. With a blog you have to have some reason for them to go there, and he mistakenly believed that his mewlings on Twitter were a huge draw, when they were really more like a car crash that passers-by stared at.

-Doug in Sugar Pine