As presidential candidates enter the most heated phase of the election year yet, former President Donald Trump has made a noticeable change in tone on his Truth Social profile, posting increasingly vulgar, misogynistic and vindictive posts.
Just this week, he reposted messages calling for the imprisonment of his political opponents, calling for the return of “open military tribunals” for people like former President Barack Obama, and making an explicit sexual joke about Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent. The repost of the sexual joke appears to have now been removed from Trump's profile.
But you’ll only see that if you’re a Truth Social user. On other, more mainstream platforms like X and TikTok, Trump has maintained a more even tone, one seemingly designed for consumption by a much broader group of American voters.
Truth Social has long been a safe space for Trump allies and supporters, a place where they are free to support unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and a quest for revenge, with the distinct possibility that those posts could be seen and reposted — or “repeated” — by Trump himself. But it has a much more limited reach than the major platforms, leaving things largely out of sight and minds of the vast majority of Americans.
On Truth Social, Trump was able to feed the fan base of fans who posted more extreme conspiracy theories and calls to action, while on larger platforms like X he had a much more polished presence.
On Wednesday, Trump posted and shared a series of particularly extreme messages on Truth.
“How we can actually fix the system,” read a repost from Truth, featuring photoshopped images of Hilary Clinton, President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former public health official Anthony Fauci, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Harris, all sitting in orange jumpsuits behind prison bars.
“Denounce the incitement of the unelected J6 committee,” reads another text, followed by “tell the truth if you want to lock them up.”
Another shows a photo of Trump sitting next to Obama with the words: “All roads lead to Obama. Retruth if you want public military tribunals.”
And one of them includes a screenshot, apparently by X, of a response to a photo of Harris and Clinton, saying that oral sex “affected both of their careers in different ways.”
Trump has frequently used his Truth Social platform to smear enemies and weigh in on the various legal cases against him, so much so that a New York judge found him guilty of contempt of court for violating a gag order based in part on his posts. In March, he shared a video depicting Biden tied to the bed of a pickup truck. And in July, he posted again, calling for a “televised military tribunal” for former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and quoting Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War began, in which he said, “There are only two parties now: traitors and patriots.”
But the sexualized nature of the attack on Harris opened a new path, one that suggests Harris will have a stronger fight against Trump than Biden.
Asked on CNN about the sexual post about Clinton and Harris, Trump's senior adviser Jason Miller downplayed the discussion about the post as a “distraction,” and sought to draw a comparison to the criticism Trump has faced from Democrats “ever since he came down the escalator” when he first announced his candidacy for president in 2015.
“I have not discussed that with the president, I don't know if the president even saw the comment that was on it, or just the photo. That's not something I asked,” Miller said Thursday on CNN.
That they haven’t seen or discussed specific posts by the former president is a common defense Trump’s campaign uses when it comes to the more extreme posts he makes on Truth Social, echoing the Republican Party’s efforts to dismiss Trump’s Twitter comments during his time in office by using the same claim.
That social media silo has also made it easier for the general public to distance themselves from some of the former president’s more bombastic posts. Instead of an X-post that gets hundreds of thousands of likes, Trump’s Truth Social account, which sometimes sees more than a hundred posts in a single day, is often unanimously cheered on by a few thousand supporters on the app.
There could be a danger for Trump among the broader electorate if his highly charged messages penetrate a wider audience, former Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida told MSNBC on Thursday.
“This attack is so commonplace in a campaign, especially a presidential campaign, that it makes sense for the Harris campaign to ignore it and let it speak for itself,” Curbelo said. “Ultimately, it hurts him with the type of swing voters that will ultimately decide this election.”
Trump's posts on Truth Social stand in stark contrast to his presence on other social media platforms.
His most controversial posts on Truth Social don’t appear on his X account, which has more than 90 million followers. Instead, he’s recently touted a new crypto project, shared campaign ads and graphics, promoted his media appearances and other projects, while also criticizing Harris and the Justice Department after a federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment against Trump for election interference in response to a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
On TikTok, which Trump joined in June after trying to ban the app while in office, he has posted similar, but relatively tame, content. In several direct-to-camera videos for his 10.7 million followers, the former president railed against inflation, promised to make the US “a safe nation again” and repeated slogans like “too big to rig” and “make America great again.”
His YouTube channel, which has 3.2 million subscribers, also posts attack ads, Trump's Fox News appearances and his speeches.
Trump has 7.6 million followers on Truth Social, where his posts are often reposted thousands of times and generate tens of thousands of interactions.
Trump’s presidency has been defined in part by his near-constant presence on X. He regularly sparred with rivals at all hours of the day and night, upending news cycles by announcing new policies or making personnel changes at any moment.
But after spending much of the end of the 2020 election cycle and the months afterward repeatedly stoking false claims that the election had been stolen from him, he was banned from the platform, and then from Twitter, two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. The company said it had “permanently suspended” Trump, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Trump retreated from Truth Social, which he launched in February 2022, and has since made it his digital home. After some initial growth, the app has struggled to attract users, and the company behind it has seen its stock price fall in recent weeks.
Elon Musk restored Trump's account in November 2022 after purchasing the platform.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
