Could former President Donald Trump be the X factor?
He posted his Fulton County Jail mug shot on the former Twitter platform and it has gone viral with 200 million views, 1.4 million likes, 322,000 reposts, and endless comments. And that’s of presstime Friday eve.
In a savvy marketing move, Trump links to his website — donaldjtrump.com — where he leans into his arrest and booking “at the notoriously violent jail in Fulton County, Georgia” and asks for donations from $24 to $3,300.
Trump has been posting exclusively on his TruthSocial platform and emailing like crazy for years but appears to be pivoting back to Elon Musk’s X social media platform — especially after his debate-night interview with Tucker Carlson.
Musk even pinned his comment under Trump’s X post saying “approximately 10 million views per hour of this image.” He’s referring to Trump’s mug shot on the former president’s old haunt @realdonaldtrump.
David Gerzof Richard, a professor of communication sciences at Emerson College and founder of BIGfish PR, said Trump’s return could revive the former Twitter once again.
“Trump is a brilliant marketer and he knows what Twitter, or X, can do for him. It got him elected the first time,” Gerzof Richard told the Herald. “This could breathe new life into the platform … I don’t know about making America great again, but he will make Twitter great again.”
Trump was banned from Twitter in January 2021 for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. In November 2022, Musk polled Twitter users on Trump’s possible return after he bought the platform. They voted to lift the former president’s ban.
He’s back but it’s too soon to tell if he will fire up the tweets as he has done in the past.
Trump was arrested and fingerprinted Thursday night in Atlanta on charges that he and several of his allies attempted to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. While the arrest was Trump’s fourth in a range of criminal cases across the country, it was the first time local authorities required him to take a mug shot.
Yet, that photo could put him back in the White House.