Political Blogging is Easy
Donald Trump gave it up after a month. He got teased.
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“Donald Trump’s new media platform is nothing but a blog. A blog! How twenty-years-ago.”
That is what commentators on CNN, MSNBC, the NY Times and other places in the establishment media called it. A mere blog. I had not quite understood that blogs were old-hat. I thought they were cool. Apparently not.
They aren’t part of a network, designed to be shared and re-tweeted. It is more like a man on the side of a road, hoping to draw a crowd. The cool, modern way to influence people is to join a crowd and say things that people in the crowd find interesting and good—or infuriating—and then they tell others, meaning more and more people in the crowd share it.
Trump’s website is www.donaldjtrump.com, and the news is that he is shutting it down. He wrote one or two posts a day, nearly all of them consistent with the Trump style of accusation and outrage. Mitch McConnell is a turncoat, Paul Ryan is a RINO, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are losers and everyone hates them, the House and Senate members who voted for impeachment are guilty of treason against the GOP. Most of his posts were about the 2020 election or Republicans who disagreed with his version of it.
He has the resources of taxpayer-paid staff—and he is, after all, presumably a billionaire himself who pays almost no taxes—and yet the website lacks the functionality of even my own blog, and I am a technology ignoramus doing this on my own. No comment section; no search function; no archives; no “follow by email” section. It was a spare one-way site. Some of the criticism focused on that.
My own criticism is of what he did and did not do with the blog. It begins with a landing page showing Trump looking presidential and on the job in the present tense. We are rebuilding our nation. Who is saving America now? “President Donald J. Trump.”
Then it led to this photo and the invitation to watch a video. The landing page shows Trump in charge, looking commanding. This one is Trump-the-visionary.
It invites people to shop for branded merchandise. There is a lot of margin in a $30 hat they can source for $2. You can buy a ceramic mug with the words “Don’t blame me. I voted for Trump” for $35. I understand that businesses need mark-ups and margins, but this seems abusive. I would feel that way if Biden were doing it.
Then it asks for direct contributions toward some unclear ongoing or future political effort. “Please contribute ANY AMOUT IMMEDIATELY to stand with President Trump and to SAVE AMERICA.”
A blog is any person’s own place of free speech. His site, his rules, and he can assert he won the election and nobody can stop him. Writing long-form complaints isn’t his best format, but he could have worked on it. His rallies are where he shines, feeding off the energy of fans. Twitter forced him to blast out short bursts of anger, and those worked, too. He bashed his detractors and owned the libs. But he didn’t own Facebook or Twitter, and that is why they banned him. They don’t want to be the useful-idiot agents of Russian subterfuge of American elections—or Trump’s.
I have growing reservations about Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is in the business of selling ads to people who are engaged with the content and they can focus ads on people who have revealed in posts and clicks what interest them. Posts that generate can-you-believe-this anger and outrage are the ones people click on and share the most. This process feeds our worst instincts. Facebook is like Santa Claus in the Christmas song: It knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you’re awake. It knows when you’ve been bad or good. Then, knowing that, it feeds you more stuff to make you bad. The thing that is good for advertisers about Facebook is what makes it dangerous; the crowd feeds on junk food.
I have pretty much abandoned looking at Facebook. The problem wasn’t Trump using it to undermine the republic. He was just one famous user of Facebook among millions less famous doing the same thing. The problem is Facebook’s business model. I own a copy of the original form of “facebook,” the Freshman Register and its Radcliffe equivalent. It is a photo of each freshman with name and hometown. The 1,200 male students poured over the names and photos of the 300 women at Radcliffe. I don’t remember rating them. They all looked great to me. Mark Zuckerberg’s first updated version of the Register was to post the photos and let people post an anonymous rating of “hotness.” It was cruel; it was popular. It appealed to the worst instincts of people. I think it still does.
Trump had a chance in a blog to remake himself if he wanted to. He didn’t, but that is on Trump.
That brings me to announce a pending update to this blog. I was happy with Blogspot and my existing site. I am used to the look of it and I have figured out how to navigate within it and get it up and published. Google, which owns “blogspot.com,” , is soon going to stop supporting its email distribution. About 1600 people subscribe to this blog. Another 400 people go directly to the site. So, if the blog cannot be reliably emailed, then I knew I needed to explore changes, which I am doing now..
This post is the first exploration: substack.com, another host site. It accommodates paywalls, but I don’t plan one. I am just happy that you and other people read me. The new address would be https://petersage.substack.com. This is an experiment and I have time to work out the bugs—here on substack or elsewhere.
No need for readers to change anything. Not yet anyway, and probably never. This is my job, and maybe it will be a bit ragged for a few days, but I will try it out. If this works correctly, this blog post will show up both at the regular site, and be published here on substack.
Nothing wrong with a blog. Trump should have stuck with it. He would have drawn an audience. He says outrageous things and there is a market for that. America is not done with him yet.
4 comments:
Writing a blog required a longer attention span than the former guy was capable of (apologies for hanging preposition)
His followers also have a short attention span Art.
A blog is like a newspaper. Facebook, et al, are more like the "party line" that my grandparents had in rural Idaho.
"Party lines were very common in the first half of the 20th century, especially in rural areas and during the war years, when copper wire was in this short supply. A party line was a local telephone loop circuit that was shared by more than one subscriber. There was no privacy on a party line; if you were conversing with a friend, anyone on your party line could pick up their telephone and listen in."
I think Trump is going to use the COVID implant to connect with his followers. Watch for the announcement.
I got a separate email from you that appeared in my gmail "promotions" page, and I wondered if it was spam at first. It had no comments section, either. Not sure I like the new format, so far.
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