The mental meltdown of Donald Trump is continuing – even accelerating – seven months after Joe Biden beat him by more than seven million votes. In all that time Trump has never conceded defeat. But he has incited a violent insurrection and promoted numerous “fraudits” of election results that were already validated by every state election official, Democratic and Republican.
Trump’s relentless and inflammatory promulgation of the “Big Lie” is what got him banned by Twitter and Facebook. That exile from social media has had a noticeably negative effect on Trump, both emotionally and materially. But true to form, Trump refuses to accept reality. On Tuesday he released a statement that illustrates just how badly demented he has become. It said that…
“Trump’s message can reach social media audiences comparable in size to those he commanded while still on Twitter and Facebook, a New York Times analysis published Monday found. In fact, the outlet found 11 of the 89 statements Trump has published online since he was banned from mainstream social media sites have attracted ‘as many likes or shares as the median post before the ban, if not more.'”
First of all, Trump is quoting, without attribution, an excerpt from an article in Forbes Magazine that was reporting on an analysis by the New York Times.
However, it’s apparent that Trump doesn’t have the comprehension skills to understand the meaning of the quote he posted. His own excerpt notes that only 11 of his 89 post-banning statements – or 12.4% -had received comparable attention. Which means that 87.6% failed to hit that threshold. And he’s bragging about that? A more complete, in context quote would have included this…
“Before the ban, the social media post with the median engagement generated 272,000 likes and shares. After the ban, that dropped to 36,000 likes and shares. Yet 11 of his 89 statements after the ban attracted as many likes or shares as the median post before the ban, if not more.”
So over all, Trump’s social media engagement declined 86% after his banning. More importantly, online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73% sans Trump. The Times analysis also looked at his 10 most popular posts with election misinformation before and after the social media bans. “Before the ban,” the Times found, “Trump’s posts garnered 22.1 million likes and shares; after the ban, his posts earned 1.3 million likes and shares across Twitter and Facebook.”
What’s more, the article noted that much of the engagement he currently receives is coming from postings of his statements by right-wing media like Breitbart and Fox News, as well as members of his cult following and his family. But those cannot be counted as new sources of engagement because they were doing the same same thing before he was banned.
Trump has posted several statements claiming that he is happy being ousted from the social media world and that he’s better off for it. But he was certainly upset with it when it happened. He called it an “insult” and “abuse” and and cried that “they shouldn’t be allowed to get away” with it. He was so distraught that he lamented that the didn’t shut down Facebook and Twitter when he was still in office. And he predicted that the social media titans would fail without him.
In the meantime, Trump did proclaim that he would return to social media with his own website that would far surpass Facebook and twitter. But his sorry excuse for a “communications platform” shut down after than less than a month due to low traffic and his embarrassment at being mocked for yet another failure.
Trump’s inability to grasp numbers has been exposed previously by his business failures. There aren’t many people who have had four casinos go bankrupt. He repeatedly misreports easily verifiable numbers for events like his poorly attended inauguration. More recently he lied about “thousands and thousands of boats” showing up to pay him tribute, when the video showed that there were at best a couple of dozen. And he also claimed, without any evidence at all, that “Massive numbers of dead people ‘voted’” for him in 2020, “far greater than anyone has known or seen before.”
Let’s face it, whatever part of Trump’s brain handles numerical information is acutely defective. And along with his pathological compulsion to lie about everything, the only thing we can rely on from Trump with any confidence is unadulterated bullpucky. And that’s exactly what we’ve been getting.
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How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.
