President Joe Biden's re-election campaign launched its own account on former President Donald Trump's social media platform TruthSocial on Monday, Fox News reported. "Okay. Let's see how this plays out. Welcome to switch sides!" the campaign wrote in its first post on the platform under the handle @BidenHQ on Monday.
The campaign said in an interview with Fox that it joined the site to reach conservative voters and correct any "misinformation and disinformation" related to the president on the platform. So far, the campaign has released several clips of Republican primary candidates such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley attacking Trump on issues like the federal debt or his comments about the war with Israel.
Trump chose to create his own social media network after he was kicked off Facebook and Twitter following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. For more than a year, Trump posted exclusively to his more than 6 million followers on TruthSocial, even after Meta and X (formerly Twitter) reinstated his accounts last winter.
That changed in August after the former president was held in an Atlanta jail on charges of overturning his 2020 election defeat in Georgia. His mug shot was taken, and he posted the photo to X shortly after.
"Crooked Joe Biden and his team are finally admitting that Truth Social, hot as a pistol, is the only place where real news is delivered," Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Fox on Monday. "Unfortunately, Biden's continued attempt to poison the American people by spreading misinformation to divert attention from his disastrous record will not work, and they will be outshone and forgotten."
Trump reportedly signed an agreement to publish information only on TruthSocial for 18 months, which ended in June this year. TruthSocial's financial future is unclear. This month, Digital World Acquisition Corp., a SPAC that was supposed to take the platform’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, public, said it would return $533 million to investors.
For years, Democrats have avoided attacking Republican opponents online, opting instead for the Obama-era "them low, us high" strategy. But throughout the 2020 election, Democrats, such as Sen. John Fetterman, began using their online followings to post memos poking fun at their opponents.
The Biden campaign's decision to join TruthSocial is an extension of this strategy. During the first Republican primary debate in August this year, the Biden campaign released a "Dark Brandon" ad on the Fox News website.
"One of the things about campaigns is that sometimes it's just for fun," Biden deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty said of the TruthSocial account on X.