How could Donald Trump have gotten this so wrong? Who are we kidding? Trump always gets this stuff wrong. The same guy who managed to bankrupt a casino is also incapable of deploying a GitHub repository on which all the hard work has already been done. Plus ça change.

Given Twitter’s size, the prospects for Truth Social were always limited. But, by delaying as long as it has, the Trump Media & Technology Group has made its path much harder than it should have been. Now, it may be dead before it has begun. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Musk succeeds in buying Twitter, that the deal is completed within a reasonable time frame, and that, by prompting the company’s more hysterical employees to flee in horror, he manages to effect some meaningful change to its culture. Where does that leave Trump’s project? Truth Social wasn’t a mere whim or a piece of ill-considered bar-talk; it’s a real company, with 400,000 names on that waiting list and a CEO, Devin Nunes, who left Congress to lead it. And, despite all this, it’s nowhere.