As the presidential candidates head into the most heated phase of the election year so far, former President Donald Trump has made a distinctive shift in tone on his Truth Social profile, lashing out in increasingly vulgar, misogynistic and vindictive posts.
Just this week, he’s reposted messages calling for his political opponents to be jailed, calling for a return of “public military tribunals” for people like former President Barack Obama, as well as making a graphic sexual joke about Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat Hillary Clinton, his opponent in 2016. The repost of the sexual joke now appears to have been removed from Trump’s profile.
But you’d only see that if you’re a user of Truth Social. On other more mainstream platforms like X and TikTok, Trump has maintained a more even tone, one seemingly designed for consumption by a much wider swath of American voters.
Truth Social has long been a safe space for Trump allies and acolytes, a place they’re free to lean into unfounded claims of election fraud and a search for revenge, with the distinct possibility those messages could be seen and reposted — or “retruthed” — by Trump himself. But it has a far more limited reach than the major platforms, leaving things largely out of sight and mind for the vast majority of Americans.
On Truth Social, Trump has been able to feed the frenzy of fans who post more extreme conspiracy theories and calls to action, while maintaining a far more manicured presence on larger platforms like X.
On Wednesday, Trump made and shared a particularly extreme series of posts on Truth.
“How to actually fix the system,” one Truth repost read, with 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.
“Indict the unselect J6 committee sedition,” another reads, followed by “retruth if you want to lock them up.”
Another features a picture of Trump sitting next to Obama with the words “All roads lead to Obama. Retruth if you want public military tribunals.”
And one includes a screenshot apparently from X of a reply to a photo of Harris and Clinton that oral sex “impacted both their careers differently.”
Trump has regularly used his Truth Social platform to denigrate enemies, and weigh in on the various legal cases against him, so much so that a New York judge held him in contempt of court for violating a gag order, in part based on his posts. In March, he shared a video that included an image of Biden bound in the back of a pickup truck. And in July, he reposted another call for a “televised military tribunal” for former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and a quote from Ulysses S. Grant after the start of the Civil War, in which he said: “There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots.”
But the sexualized nature of the attack on Harris broached a new frontier, one that comes as all indications point to Harris running a more competitive race against Trump than Biden was.
Asked on CNN about the sexual post about Clinton and Harris, Trump senior adviser Jason Miller downplayed a discussion about the post as a “distraction,” trying to draw a comparison to the criticisms Trump has faced from Democrats “ever since he came down the escalator” in announcing his first presidential bid in 2015.
“I haven’t discussed that with the president, I don’t know if the president even saw the comment that was on there, or simply the picture. That’s not something I have asked,” Miller said Thursday on CNN.
That it hasn’t seen or discussed specific posts with the former president is often the defense Trump’s campaign uses when it comes to the more extreme posts he makes on Truth Social, and harkens back to GOP attempts to brush aside Trump’s statements on Twitter while he was in office by using the same claim.
That social media silo has also made it easier for the general public to disengage with some of the former president’s more bombastic posts. Instead of an X post that receives hundreds of thousands of likes, Trump’s Truth Social account, which sometimes sees over a hundred posts in a single day, are often unanimously applauded by a few thousands supporters on the app.
There could be a danger for Trump with the broader electorate if those highly charged posts do break through to a wider audience, former Florida GOP Rep. Carlos Curbelo told MSNBC on Thursday.
“This attack is so, just, beneath a campaign, especially a presidential campaign, that it does make sense for the Harris campaign to ignore it and to allow it to speak for itself,” Curbelo said. “Ultimately, this ends up hurting him with the types of swing voters who will ultimately decide this election.”
Trump’s posts to 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, boosted 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 decision on presidential immunity.
On TikTok, which Trump joined in June after trying to ban the app while in office, he has similarly posted content that is relatively tame by comparison. In several direct-to-camera videos to his 10.7 million followers, the former president railed against inflation, promised to make the U.S. “a safe nation again,” and repeated catchphrases including “too big to rig” and “make America great again.”
His YouTube channel, which has 3.2 million subscribers, similarly posts attack ads, Trump’s Fox news appearances and his speeches.
Trump comparatively has 7.6 million followers on Truth Social, where his posts can rack up a few thousand reposts and tens of thousands of interactions.
Trump’s presidency was defined in part by his near-constant presence on X. He’d frequently spar with rivals at all hours of the day and night, and upend news cycles by announcing new policies or making personnel changes at a moment’s notice.
But after spending much of the end of the 2020 election cycle, and the months after it, repeatedly stoking false claims the election had been stolen from him, he was banned from the platform, then Twitter, two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The company said it had “permanently suspended” Trump, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Trump retreated to Truth Social, which he launched in February 2022, and has since made it his digital home base. After some initial growth, the app has struggled to attract users, and the company behind the app has seen its share price drop in recent weeks.
Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account in November 2022 after he bought the platform.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com