"Trump Is a Coward" Trends on Truth Social

Uno Reverse

Over the weekend, presidential candidate Donald Trump took to Truth Social, the social media app he started and owns a majority stake in, to announce that he would be backing out of a scheduled debate against his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump had agreed to the debate, which was slated for September 10 on ABC, when incumbent President Joe Biden was still in the race. But with Biden off the ticket and Harris poised to become the Democratic nominee, the ex-president reneged; he's now pushing for a September debate — if a debate happens at all — to be held under different conditions at the conservative network Fox.

Trump's withdrawal has been unsurprisingly met with backlash, with critics charging that the former president's take-backsies on the debate represented cowardice. And incredibly, that critique even spread to the ever-strange online world that is Truth Social: as caught by Raw Story, the hashtag #trumpisacoward trended on Truth Social on Sunday in response to the debate news.

Reality Check

Per Raw Story, the phrase first started trending on X-formerly-Twitter before making its way over to Truth Social. In true Truth Social fashion, the other trending hashtags at the time were #Jesus, #Faith, #MAGA, and #Trump2024. Naturally.

But upon closer inspection, it doesn't look like the #trumpisacoward tweets were coming from die-hard MAGA accounts. Truthers posting the phrase included accounts with titles like "Realitycheck," which offers up a telling "Fuck Trump" in its bio; "The GOP Karma Train," whose bio reads that "in a world that has gone crazy," they're "patiently waiting for Trump to be held accountable for his countless crimes"; and "Real_Conservative5," who writes in their bio that "it's sad to see a once conservative party" become "the party of Trump, crime, treason and lies."

In other words, even though #trumpisacoward was indeed trending on Trump's generally very pro-Trump social media site, it wasn't that the average Trump-supporting Truth Social user had suddenly turned against the former president. Instead, the hashtag's popularity was driven by a mass posting spree from the platform's resist crowd, which does appear to actually exist.

Even so, if you're Trump, the searing criticism on home turf probably rankled.

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