sinking ship

Donald Trump’s flailing Truth Social appears to have reached code red status

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In the least surprising news of the century, less than one month after its launch, Donald Trump‘s latest business venture, Truth Social, appears to be in a complete freefall.

Following a barrage of bad press earlier this week, ex-congressman Devin Nunes, who resigned from office to become CEO of the app’s creator Trump Media and Technology Group, says his team is working “literally around the clock” to try and save the flailing social media brand.

Since its launch, Truth Social has been plagued by a number of technical issues and behind-the-scenes chaos.

Per the Daily Beast:

In recent weeks, sources have heard the former president on the phone swearing gratuitously and asking things like, “What the f*ck is going on” with Truth Social.

He’s repeatedly groused about the negative press and the less-than-stellar optics of the rollout, these sources said. And he’s demanded to know why more people aren’t using it—why the app isn’t swiftly dominating the competition.

It has also failed to take off with users.

A preliminary report by SimilarWeb, which tracks website traffic from public and private sources, found the site doing “either worse or the same” as several other MAGA social media platforms, including Gab, Gettr, and Parler.

According to SimilarWeb’s estimates, Truth Social saw a sharp uptick of roughly 2 million daily visits when it first launched last month, but traffic quickly nosedived to less than 300,000 daily visits shortly after that.

Downloads have tanked, too.

Newsweek reports that, after becoming the number one free app on the Apple marketplace the week it launched, with 361,000 downloads, Truth Social has fallen down–waaaaay down–to barely 90,000 downloads three weeks later.

Related: We can officially add Truth Social to the ever-growing list of Donald Trump’s business failures

“Our team is working literally around the clock 24/7,” Nunes told reporters this week. “And as we grow and as we add people, we squash bugs, we’re making changes right. Matter of fact, we should have in the next day or two another Apple update.”

Nunes, who once tried to sue a fictional cow, admitted that Truth Social is “not perfect” but the team is “doing everything we can to keep the platform clean, and to keep off all the nasty bots and the people that aren’t really real people.”

Of course, it might help if Trump himself actually expressed interest the site. In the three weeks since its launch, the ex-president has only posted one “truth”,  the app’s equivalent of a tweet, on his profile.

His wife, too, appears totally disinterested in the platform. Last month, Melania Trump announced a “special arrangement” to share “exclusive communications” with Parler, the far-right social media site Truth Social intends to compete with.

Related: Melania has a new grift and it’s even more grifty than her last one

In Trump’s defense, however, he’s been a little preoccupied. In addition to being at the center of multiple civil and criminal investigations, he recently had to refinance the mortgage on Trump Tower with a $100 million loan, the CEO of his crumbling hotel brand just quit, along with his longtime accounting firm, and his private plane almost crashed outside New Orleans last weekend.

Now, some tweets…

Graham Gremore is the Features Editor and a Staff Writer at Queerty. Follow him on Twitter @grahamgremore.