Skip to content Skip to footer

Trump’s New Official Website Attempts to Rewrite History and Gain Online Clout

The site omits Trump’s many scandals and impeachments and deflects blame for his mishandling of the pandemic.

Former President Trump leaves Trump Tower in Manhattan on March 9, 2021, in New York City.

Former President Donald Trump has launched a new website that promotes himself heavily as a “magnificent” leader, failing to contextualize that ambitious claim with the numerous scandals, two impeachments, and hundreds of thousands of deaths from coronavirus that occurred under his tenure.

Trump’s site masks the difficulties he had in office while describing his supposed successes in positive ways. But many observers have noted that the site, viewable at 45office.com, appears to also be a vainglorious attempt at rewriting the history of the past four years.

“The Office of Donald J. Trump is committed to preserving the magnificent legacy of the Trump Administration, while at the same time advancing the America First agenda,” the site’s main landing page states, hinting that the former Republican will seek to continue influencing the U.S. political scene for some time to come.

News media across the web have panned the site as being one-sided and misleading. The Guardian published an article about the website with the headline: “Donald Trump uses new website to rewrite history of his presidency.”

The Guardian calls out the language Trump’s site uses, describing his actions and accomplishments that are listed as being “hyperbolic.”

Beyond omitting a number of his failures and follies, the Trump site also attempts to deflect blame as well. For example, while discussing his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic, the site makes it seem as though all responsibility for U.S. deaths rests solely with China.

“When the coronavirus plague arrived from China, afflicting every nation around the globe, President Trump acted early and decisively,” the site claims, disregarding the fact that Trump spent weeks falsely claiming the virus would go away on its own, and subsequently downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19 throughout the remainder of 2020.

More than 400,000 Americans died from the virus while Trump was in office. Numerous studies and former health officials that served within his office have contended that his inaction on the pandemic likely led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

The about section for the site, at just under 900 words, reads like a love letter of sorts for the former president — again highlighting his supposed accomplishments while neglecting to mention his failures or wrongly deflecting blame to others.

“President Trump never wavered in defense of our values, our families, our traditions, and our freedom,” the website claims.

However, Trump’s actions and statements as president often did run counter to many Americans’ families and values. He regularly engaged in racist rhetoric, including telling four congresswomen of color to “go back” to their own countries before criticizing his governing style. Meanwhile, he sowed division and hatred of undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups.

Trump’s actions in his final months in office, too, were largely antithetical to the oft-observed peaceful transfer of power between administrations, as he engaged in pressure campaigns toward state officials throughout the U.S. to defy the will of voters after losing to now-President Joe Biden in last year’s presidential race. He also sought to disrupt the certification process of the Electoral College by encouraging his own vice president, Mike Pence, to reject the results, despite Pence not having the actual constitutional power to do so.

Trump’s new website, besides being a conceited attempt to spin his record, appears to also be an attempt to reestablish his online presence. The site “is part of Trump’s efforts to reconstruct his digital presence after essentially being deplatformed after January’s Capitol insurrection,” Axios’s Sara Fischer noted.

Trump has been banned from all of the major social media websites, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, following his inciting statements on those platforms after a mob of his loyalists attacked the U.S. Capitol in January.

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy