Former President Trump may be back on social media as soon as late May according to one of his top advisers. But he won’t be showing up on the usual platforms like Twitter and Facebook, who have banned the Bad Orange Man permanently for being the Bad Orange Man. According to Jason Miller, Donald Trump is in the process of launching his own platform. Whether this is a real plan or just an idea that’s in the early planning stages wasn’t immediately clear. Competing with the existing social media giants isnt’ for the faint of heart as we’ve repeatedly seen recently, but if anyone could pull it off, it’s probably Donald J. Trump. (NY Post)

Former President Donald Trump will return to social media within the next few months — and with his own service, his top adviser said Sunday.

Jason Miller told Fox News’ ​”Media Buzz” that the former president will be back in two to three months, and will launch a new platform that he claimed would “completely redefine the game” and attract tens of millions of users.

Twitter dropped Trump from its platform in January just days after a mob of his supporters marched on the Capitol as Congress was certifying the 2020 election for President Biden.

Assuming this is a serious plan, it would almost certainly have to have been in development for a while now. (Making it surprising that we haven’t heard about it before this.) Two or three months is no amount of time at all to take such a project from the drawing board to its launch date. Of course, the other possibility is that Trump is buying a controlling interest in another platform that was already in development.

If this happens, Trump would face several challenges that have plagued the launch of other competing social media networks such as Gab and Parler. But at the same time, he would enjoy some distinct advantages that those start-ups lacked.

In terms of his advantages, the biggest challenges facing anyone trying to take on a company like Twitter are the need for investment capital and the prospect of rapidly growing a base of users. Trump’s ability to spend his own money and call on investors he’s done business with for decades should make the cashflow situation almost an afterthought. The user base challenge should be a non-factor also. If Trump announces that the new platform is going live and he’s the first user, there will be tens, if not hundreds of millions of people rushing to sign up. Their biggest problem will be keeping the servers from crashing during the early days.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be other hurdles to overcome. Building a functional social media network doesn’t get you over the finish line. You also need someone to host it. We’ve already seen that Apple and Google have been more than willing to deplatform any network that they deem to be insufficiently woke. To avoid the fate that awaited Parler after its initial launch, Trump might have to build his own hosting platform as well. Again, that would likely be manageable for him, but it would make the idea of this enterprise launching before June even less likely.

Would you sign up for it if this turns out to be real? I’m very confident I would. And you can bet that pretty much every journalist in the world who covers American politics would have a burner account on the network just so they can keep tabs on what Trump is saying to his legions of followers. That doesn’t mean that Twitter and Facebook are going to collapse overnight, but they could finally face some viable competition. And there would be at least one globally competitive platform where the silencing of conservative voices wouldn’t be a daily occurrence.