GETTR Had a Very Visible Presence at CPAC. Trump’s TRUTH Social? Not So Much.
Photo by Sarah Rumpf
Former President Donald Trump was an inescapable presence at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held last week at the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel in Orlando, Florida. However, his newly-launched social media platform, TRUTH Social, was scarcer than a Bush family member at the MAGA-riffic confab.
Ever since the former president was excommunicated from the major social media networks in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, speculation has swirled about what alterna-Twitter Trump might join.
GETTR, headed by former Trump adviser Jason Miller, reportedly made a nine-figure offer to get his old boss to sign up, but was unsuccessful. One big reason: Trump was launching his own social media platform, the aforementioned TRUTH Social.
Former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) resigned from Congress to become TRUTH Social’s new CEO, and it finally launched last month — but not without hitting some bumps in the road. The app is only available on Apple, not Android, so far, and new users found themselves stuck in six-digit long waitlists when they attempted to sign up for an account. A Daily Dot reporter was able to access the app’s internal beta version and raised some troubling questions about its security vulnerabilities.
Your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor wandered around the grounds of the Rosen Shingle Creek all four days of CPAC (my Apple Watch tracked all the miles I racked up every day), and found lots of representation for GETTR but not one single logo, promotional item, or event from TRUTH Social.
GETTR was a high-level sponsor for CPAC this year, with their logo shown in the third tier (the “Partnering” Sponsors) in various signage and materials displayed around the conference (see photo below). Their logo was also on giant label overlays applied to one of the staircases in an atrium near the main ballroom, as shown in the image at the top of this article.
Photo by Sarah Rumpf
Mediaite caught up with Kaelan Dorr, GETTR’s VP of marketing and engagement, at their booth in the CPAC exhibition hall. Among their promotional displays was a sign labeled “IN MEMORIAM” with Twitter’s bird logo depicted as dead, along with some battery-operated candles in a mock vigil.
Photo by Sarah Rumpf
Dorr, who described his job as “to wake up every day and try to figure out how to make [GETTR] a fun place to be,” told Mediaite that GETTR viewed it as a priority to have a “strong presence” at CPAC.
“This is obviously one of our target demographics,” said Dorr, noting there were many attendees who were “very upset about being censored or shadow-banned or, you know, having their their lives be canceled on the internet and things like that. So this just felt like actually the place to be.”
Dorr felt that GETTR been “very, very, very well received so far” at CPAC, mentioning that they had brought “a ton of hats, shirts, things like that” and they were “pretty much gone” after the first day. “Just an incredible reaction…I mean, we can’t even walk down the hallway without someone asking us about what we’re wearing,” he said, gesturing to the GETTR logo on his jacket.
In response to a question about TRUTH Social, Dorr said GETTR wanted to “welcome them to the battlefield,” because “it’s really all about driving the conversation towards taking down some of these practices by Big Tech. They “want more people involved in the conversation,” he continued, because most people didn’t just use one social media platform, so “we’re absolutely happy to welcome them on board.”
According to Dorr, GETTR was “really close” to having 5 million users, about half of whom were in the U.S. Other countries with significant numbers of users included France, Germany, the U.K., Brazil, India, and Japan.
Mediaite briefly spoke to Mercedes Schlapp, the wife of American Conservative Union (the organization that puts on CPAC) chairman Matt Schlapp and herself a key CPAC official, to ask about GETTR’s sponsorship and the lack of presence for TRUTH Social. Both Schlapps regularly communicate with both Trump and Nunes. Mercedes Schlapp told Mediaite she was not sure if there had been any discussions about TRUTH Social being a sponsor but said she was under the impression they were not quite ready so close to their launch date.
Mediaite requested a comment from the official CPAC communications email regarding TRUTH Social but did not get a reply.
Trump did mention TRUTH Social during his remarks Saturday evening, during two brief moments. The first came near the beginning when he was rewarding various Republican elected officials and candidates in the audience for their loyalty by calling out their names for applause. He included Nunes in the middle of that group, describing the former congressman as “tough as hell” and telling the crowd that Nunes was “working on a little project called TRUTH Social, called TRUTH Social, which has been trending at the top all over the place, and it is going to give our voice back.”
It should be noted that TRUTH Social was not trending that night on Twitter, or anywhere else that this reporter could find.
Later, near the end of his remarks, Trump mentioned TRUTH Social once more. Like before, he phrased it in a way that sounded like it was a thing that had not quite happened yet.
“Another top priority to save American democracy must be to break up the Big Tech giants and restore free speech in America,” Trump declared. “And we’ll be fighting that very hard by opening TRUTH Social, TRUTH Social. The days of Big Tech censoring the voices of the American people are numbered.”
He then spent more time complaining about OAN getting kicked off cable providers’ listings than he did promoting his own social media platform — including calling out to the crowd, “Who listens to OAN? I do!”
Even while Trump was on the main CPAC stage, GETTR had the spotlight. Its sponsorship level meant that its logo was repeatedly displayed on the screen behind the former president.
Photo by Sarah Rumpf
Watch the video above, via CPAC 2022.
