To be honest, it's a surprise for me. Because in order to win, Trump needs to broaden his audience. What's the point of limiting himself to only his supporters on truth? They are his hardcore supporters anyway. It’s like preaching to the choir.
> in order to win, Trump needs to broaden his audience
I don't think this is true. Trump's message, image, and behavior were possibly the most widely/frequently broadcast of any human in history. There is effectively no stone left unturned for him.
There was also some analysis during his presidency that the more he tweeted, the worse his approval rating got. That might not be true these days, but it shows that not all publicity is good publicity.
> What's the point of limiting himself to only his supporters on truth?
He can squeeze them for donations, just as he does with his email campaigns.
In the last election, he got more votes than anybody had in history. He lost only because he opponent got even more than that.
Much has changed since then. His opponent came with a relatively clean track record, at a time when he himself was seen to be struggling with a crisis. The opponent now has several crises of his own to deal with, most notably inflation, an issue that strikes close to home for a lot of voters.
So broadening his base may not be necessary. His base is quite enthusiastic, and it may suffice merely to demoralize his opponents. That strategy had worked for him in his first election, and now can come with the advantage of spending two years harassing the incumbent.
There are always too many variables to predict confidently, but his wisest course of action may simply be to do exactly what he's always done and hope that circumstances break his way -- which they very well could.
Trump's gonna HAVE to start posting again because of the optics. The most recent tweets on his profile are the tweets from right before he got banned - the Capitol insurrection tweets. His profile is now just a glowing reminder of the Capitol insurrection. Terrible look for Trump. He's gonna need to either start deleting, or start burying these with new tweets, because the current situation is not exactly positive for him.
He could simply post that he's on another platform and leave it, and/or make the account private, so that no one can create another account with the same Twitter handle 30 days after the account is closed.
I don't think so. People who think there was an insurrection and Trump was behind it are not going to be swayed and believe Trump must be imprisoned if not for that then something else. Those who think it's a political witch hunt with about as much credibility of the Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election story won't be either, they'll only ever see it as evidence of political persecution.
If anything I would say it's slightly more annoying for the insurrection conspiracy theorists to deal with because any time someone brings up those tweets they'll have to explain that when you connect all the dots it actually means Trump was behind it, and by that stage you've already lost the attention of most readers.
I’m firmly in the camp of not wanting to hear anything more from Trump in my lifetime, but I do wonder if there is any ideological side to this from Musk.
It’s not clear at all that Trump coming back to Twitter is good for him, or for Republicans. Banning him I think took a lot of the bad side of the conservative culture out of the spotlight and bringing him back will make it front and center again. A consistent message I saw from Republicans was his policies aren’t bad but could he just stop Tweeting. It will get ugly but if Trump is able to rile DeSantis up into a public fight, it will probably be bad for discourse but good for Democrats.
The ideological piece would be the bad ideas and sunlight thing. Trump, as an important voice in the Republican Party should be visible so people can vote against him if they so choose.
In the last few years this strain of neo-libertarianism has become rather distinguishable. It's a weird cocktail of shamelessness, anti-any-government, "nothing matters", "money is power", crypto and web3 scammers and anarchists.
The ultra-rich like Musk fit right in because "small government and no regulation" movement plays right into their hands. In murky waters where everyone is off your case, you can grab even more money and power.
Recall that Musk expressed a very clear distaste for Cheetoh Jesus in the early days but, like many before him, the black hole that is Trump pulled in the "star" and then ripped it apart. He got a taste of that world and he liked it. Being horrible and owning it is sort of freeing (for someone who can afford it).
I mean there’s changing your mind through learning and growing, and then there’s spewing contradictory ideas as they pop into your head because they suit you in the moment. I may be proven wrong but this feels to me like the latter.
That's true, but that's not what's happening here. Musk reverses his stance on things whimsically and self-servingly. He's not even saying that he has new evidence. His thoughts and actions are completely erratic.
People at Twitter with more information than either Musk or me are telling us all that he isn’t well-informed and is guided by his whims and conceit, not by facts.
i'd imagine most of the american voters are not on twitter, but most of them watch cable news. Trump could publish on a Myspace page and the media would broadcast it for him.
“Fox News delivered an average total audience of 2.116 million viewers in prime time, down just 1 percent from the same period one year ago, according to ratings data compiled by Nielsen. MSNBC was second with 1.295 million viewers (down 2 percent from 2021), while CNN was a distant third in prime with 731,000 viewers—down 15% from one year ago.”
“The country with the most Twitter users is the United States with a total of 77.75 million users.”
By the way, thanks for pointing this out. With all this craziness around Musk's ventures and Twitter, my BS detector has become totally blinded. Hadn't I posted this comment and then had been corrected, I would have still believed Musk was able to commit to these crazy terms. Of course, this would be too much even for him.
Speaking of the benefits of sharing one's thoughts on HN.
Kara Swisher had a pretty good tweet thread about this. Essentially: Musk is doing a pretty good job single handedly attracting attention to Twitter, but where does he go from here, executing disloyal devs on livestream?
One more thing, which may be controversial here on HN, but which I think is nonetheless correct, is that Musk has been effectively cornered by the previous Twitter board. He has no other choice but to count every penny and squeeze the maximum from the remaining employees. See the revenue vs loan payments estimates.
So the blame for all the drastic measures such as mass layoffs and such, should be equally shared by the ex-board if not solely.
And I'm sure if on earth 2 the board had rejected his offer, citing any of these reasons you'd be in full agreement with them....
I mostly remember Musk fans cheering this madness on as it was happening. The timing was ridiculously terrible given the market downturn but I'm pretty sure anyone sympathetic to your current argument would have been cursing the board if they had rejected his bid.
You are probably right. Still, it's not just negotiating and signing a burdensome deal for Musk, but going as far as SUING him into honoring it, that makes their intent obvious (purely monetary reward, no regard for the employees nor the product, nor societal impact). They knew exactly what it meant for Twitter but went for it anyway just to get a payout.
Again, this was their fiduciary duty to do so but then not holding them accountable for selling out is ridiculous.
He voluntarily offered to pay $44 billion and voluntarily signed a contract saying he'd do so. Insisting that he follow through with what he voluntarily made a binding commitment to do is hardly "cornering". The debt that has been taken on was his idea, part of the original offer he made, it's not like he didn't plan for Twitter having that debt to pay off.
I mean, he did commit to buying them $44 billion. If he didn't want to buy them, he shouldn't have signed a contract agreeing to do so. You can't argue that Musk doesn't know what a contract is and can't get decent legal advice.
He signed the contract in a totally different market environment. Twitter's board knew this but still proceeded to sue him nonetheless. Did they understand the consequences for the company and the employees? Sure they did but went on anyway.
He made an unsolicited offer, the board didn't even want him to buy it and explored a bunch of options to prevent a hostile takeover, so he kept pushing, then they said fine, and then the market turned, and then he started walking it back trying to find any reason to back out, but eventually couldn't. This was 100% a self-inflicted wound.
