Trump is back on Twitter

Or at least someone posting for Trump.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 06:47 pm:

Sad!

DONALD TRUMP’S FULL-BLOWN RE-EMERGENCE on X on Monday, after a hiatus of more than three-and-a-half years, was the latest indication that he is unsettled by the state of the presidential campaign and fears his chances could be slipping away.

[...]

Having once boasted that he was the “Hemingway of 140 characters,” Trump’s return to the platform was cheered by his diehard fans as the equivalent of a championship boxer stepping back in the ring.

But Trump unplugged on X also amplifies what many dislike about him. He has 7.5 million followers on Truth Social compared to 88.2 million on X, a platform from which many reporters have decamped—meaning his messages are more likely to generate more general attention and negative press coverage.

[...]

Trump the candidate insists on big rallies and social media posts in something like the way that a man with dangerously high cholesterol keeps eating cheeseburgers: They’re tasty treats, but they’re bad for him.

“Look, I love Trump on Twitter,” a confidant said. “But one of the advantages on Truth Social was that nobody was on there and he could say basically whatever he wanted and a lot of the problematic stuff just didn’t get seen.

[...]

In recent weeks, aides to the ex-president have found themselves in a place familiar to many veterans of Trump World: hoping to more finely curate the public appearances of a man incapable and unwilling of staying tightly on message.

  The Bulwark

Have they met Trump?

One plan—to hold so-called “messaging events” that revolve around specific topics—will be test-driven by the campaign Wednesday in Asheville, North Carolina, where Trump is slated to discuss the economy.

Is slated to lie about the economy. And he won't be able to stay on that message either.

[R]ecent polls show Vice President Kamala Harris is cutting into Trump’s margins on the issue. Advisers hope events like this will serve as mini-rallies and effectively truncate the loquacious ex-president’s stemwinders (Trump’s speech at his Saturday rally in Montana went on for nearly an hour and forty minutes).

Hope is a beautiful thing, eh?

In Trump’s broad circle of longtime advisers, confidants, and former campaign and White House staffers, the ex-president is seen not just as the cause of his current problems but also the antidote to them.

How he's going to be the antidote, I can't imagine.

“This is his campaign. We work for him. He sets the message.”

That is exactly my point.

Last Thursday, Trump’s team sought to reframe coverage of the campaign by hosting a background briefing with legacy media and conservative press. But Trump decided to maximize coverage by turning it into a press conference. The plan going into the event was to contrast Trump’s ability to face questions with Harris’s refusal to do the same up until that point. He was supposed to clearly define the vice president as “dangerously liberal.”

Instead, Trump gave meandering stream-of-consciousness answers that included a record 162 lies and distortions, according to an NPR analysis. The affair ended up renewing criticisms about the 78-year-old’s mental fitness. The Saturday before, Trump gave a similarly directionless 90-minute rally speech in Georgia where he attacked the swing state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and his wife.

And do you think any future appearances will be any different?

Trump’s high-profile speech at the Republican National Convention was drafted to focus on the assassination attempt he had survived just a week before, as part of a larger address that would eschew sharp political jabs against his then-opponent, Biden. Instead, Trump spent about 19 minutes on his near-death experience before he left the teleprompter to make off-the-cuff non-sequiturs that left even supporters scratching their heads. His speech lasted 92 minutes in total, the longest convention address ever.

Yes, and they said he wasn't going to even mention the name Biden. So what did he do? He said, "I'm not supposed to talk about Biden, so I'm just going to do it this one time."

“I said what they wanted me to say. Then I said what I wanted to say,” Trump told one insider when asked why he didn’t stick to the script.

[...]

On Saturday, during his 100-minute speech in Bozeman, Montana, Trump spoke derisively of the VP for delivering a stump speech and contrasted that with his own style.

“Kamala gives the exact same speech over and over again. Over and over. The same exact words. . . . I don’t do that. I gotta give you a little bit of variety, right? I change all these damn speeches,” he said as the crowd laughed along.

“But we don’t like to read teleprompters, right? It’s not as much fun. It’s not as exciting. And somehow, it’s never as good, is it? Nah,” he said, predicting what would happen if he gave the same speech all the time: “You know what would happen? You’d start walking out,” Trump said.

Which is hilarious, because that's exactly what they were doing. Also, he can't read very well, so there's that.

Trump campaign advisers insist the race’s “fundamentals” haven’t changed—that Harris’s numbers will fall back to earth as the campaign defines her “dangerously liberal record” and as the “honeymoon” of her positive press coverage ends with the close of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 22.

They're smoking hopium.

But one former Trump campaign adviser who still speaks with the former president acknowledged that Trump “cannot get past his anger” at the assassination attempt, the decision by Biden to step aside, and Harris’s media coverage. Trump is “unsettled,” the adviser said, adding “he probably needs friends around him on the plane. He needs to just bro-out and relax and get his bearings again.”

[...]

According to eight people who have regularly spoken to Trump, the former president solicits advice from nearly everyone, but he only listens to those who know how to package the information in such a way that it jibes with his sensibilities. Those who succeed have a way of delivering otherwise-unwelcome advice in a friendly and constructive mode that doesn’t set off his hair-trigger temper. It’s more of a nudge than a push—and even that can be risky.

“Nudge is what I do and then haul ass,” said one.

[...]

Trump, at the Thursday press conference, said he would increase his pace of travel after the Democratic convention. And his desire to host big rallies now looms as a drain on campaign coffers, one that provides no measurable boost of support for him beyond the adoring fans who show up and were going to vote Trump anyway. In addition, mainstream media doesn’t televise the speeches because they’re too long, too incoherent, and too filled with falsehoods. Whatever press coverage comes from the rallies usually stems from his extemporaneous comments that lead to negative headlines.

[...]

“He loves the rallies and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because he believes he owes it to his people to give them a show,” said one longtime adviser.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. We all know why he does it. It's so he can be adored and cheered. The part about a show is right, though. That's all it is.

Further update:

They're gonna need more ketchup at Mar-A-Lago.