Well, that didn’t take long. Shortly after El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago announced the launch of his Trump-branded social media platform, TRUTH Social, hackers from Anonymous had defaced it as part of an “online war against hate” (New York Times):
Within two hours, hackers had gained access to a private version of the social network, creating fake accounts for Mr. Trump; the far-right personality Stephen K. Bannon; Ron Watkins, the QAnon conspiracy theorist; and Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, who barred Mr. Trump from Twitter after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Using a false “donaldjtrump” account, hackers posted images of defecating pigs, wrote expletive-laced rants aimed at Mr. Dorsey and inquired about the whereabouts of the former first lady Melania Trump. Images of the hackers’ handiwork were circulated on other social media platforms.
A Washington Post reporter easily signed up using the account name “mikepence” and found no security in place. “New sign-ups were blocked shortly after,” the Post reports.
That was inevitable. Everything Trump touches is sloppily done. If experienced hackers from Anonymous had not hacked him, Trump’s mythical 400-pound guy sitting on his bed or someone in New Jersey would have. But that’s not particularly worrisome.
It is a big “if” that Trump’s social network actually materializes, Damon Linker muses at The Week. “The man has proven himself a master of precisely one aspect of business, which is branding, often with little substance behind the hype.” But if it should, given the events of Jan. 6, the prospects of Trump using it to mobilize violent street actions in real time through people’s smart phones is not something to take lightly.
Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and former alt-right blogger, sketched out in May how that might work in a Claremont Institute podcast with former Trump National Security Council official Michael Anton.
Linker writes:
Yarvin calls himself a monarchist, but it’s more accurate to say he favors dictatorship — the seizing of emergency powers by a strongman who, backed by populist (though perhaps not majority or plurality) support, uses those powers to smash the resistance of the bureaucratic-administrative state and its ostensible allies in civil society, including the mainstream media, the universities, and “woke capital.”
It’s a fantasy of Caesarism, in which the right wins a total victory over its opponents. But that doesn’t mean it’s a fantasy completely disconnected from reality. Yarvin — who has since appeared as a guest for over an hour on Tucker Carlson Today, the online daytime interview program run by the prime time Fox News host — has many concrete suggestions for how his would-be Caesar should go about turning himself into a tyrant. One of them involves the use of social media to mobilize supporters around the country.
Yarvin’s vision (not repudiated during Anton’s Claremont podcast) makes the more recently revealed John Eastman memo look tame.
Linker wrote about the podcast at the time, in a post titled, “The intellectual right contemplates an ‘American Caesar’,” and quoting Yarvin on how Trump might use such an app:
to communicate directly with his 80 million supporters on their smart phones, using notifications to tell them that “this agency isn’t following my instructions,” which will prompt them to rally at the proper building, with the crowd “steered around by a joystick by Trump himself,” forming a “human barricade around every federal building, supporting Trump’s lawful authority.” Where maybe 20,000 people stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, millions responding to the Trump app would be much more effective — a modern-day version of the paramilitary groups that ensured Lincoln’s safety during the hard-fought, dangerous 1860 campaign for president that preceded the Civil War (and the president’s subsequent suspension of habeas corpus and shuttering of hundreds of newspapers).
When Anton asks how Trump-Caesar should respond to Harvard, The New York Times, and the rest of the theocratic oligarchy blaring air-raid sirens about the imposition of dictatorship, Yarvin indicates that it would be essential to “smash it” with one blow. To suggest that Caesar should be required to deal with “someone else’s department of reality is manifestly absurd.” Going on, Yarvin explains that “when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn’t sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon” and uses “all force available.” Once that happens, the whole world can be “remade.”
This scenario assumes Trump is already president, Linker notes. But used from the outside against a presidential victory by Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, Trump could use the tool to “sow electoral chaos.”
In place of spontaneous election protests by Trumpists, Trump could organize flash-mob protests outside the offices of secretaries of state across the country or, where there was one Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami-Dade County organized to stop vote-counting in November 2000, there might be hundreds in November 2024.
It might not put Trump in the White House should he lose. Republicans across the country are already organizing Republican secretaries of state and state legislatures to fix the election for whichever Republican candidate runs. But it would be yet another tool in the authoritarian toolbox meant for unmaking our democratic republic under a banner of “freedom” as corrupt as Trump and his cronies themselves.
Or, says Linker, for provoking something akin to “a postmodern, high-tech blending of the Troubles in Northern Ireland with elements of the 17th-century English Civil War and Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.”