Truss’s copying of Trump reaches a new low

News that Liz Truss is to start her own social network should come as little surprise, given that Britain’s worst-ever prime minister has clearly decided the best way to salvage her career is to slavishly copy everything Donald Trump does.

Truss told a conference last weekend: “What I am doing is establishing a new free speech network, which will be uncensored and uncancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about.” Which sounds uncannily similar to how Trump launched his Truth Social platform in 2021, saying: “We will not silence our fellow citizens simply because they might be wrong – or worse, because we think that Americans ‘can’t handle the truth.’”

There can be no doubt that someone of Truss’s financial acumen will be able to replicate the financial numbers Trump has managed with Truth Social – an astonishing loss of the equivalent of £308.2m last year off minuscule revenue equating to just £2.7m. But the woman defeated by salad has yet to explain how her new network will find a niche when it sounds so similar to X, run into the ground by her fellow free speech warrior Elon Musk.

The platform formerly known as Twitter definitely talks “about the issues people don’t want to talk about” – so much so that users and advertisers have abandoned the site in their droves. In the UK, just-released accounts show turnover fell 66.3% in 2023, from £205.3m to £69.1m. Last year, the Financial Times reported that X daily users in the UK had dropped from 8m to only around 5.6m.

None of these numbers are in any way encouraging for someone wanting to start a social network, and nor are the failures of Truss’s fellow former Tory MPs Matt Hancock and Louise Mensch, both with more experience in the digital world, to successfully launch their own.

But none of that seems to matter to Truss as long as she is doing something that Trump has done first. She is already following in his footsteps on the circuit of right wing political conferences, where she peddles a narrative that her political downfall – like Trump’s in 2020 – was engineered by the deep state and elites rather than her own stupidity.

She is plodding after Trump into the cryptocurrency space, having given details of her social network in a speech to a Bitcoin conference (and ignoring the fact that hundreds of billions have been wiped from crypto markets since he took office on January 20).

And in contrast to the stumbling, apologetic humiliations of her last days in office, Truss has learned the Trumpian art of talking nonsense with a straight face. Leading Republicans and the likes of Musk and Nigel Farage recognise the damage done to America and Trump’s own reputation by his doomed tariff plan – a moment so disastrous that it saw the president compared to Truss and her lunatic mini-budget.

Yet the 49-day PM duly popped up in the Daily Telegraph to declare: “Trump has been proven right about pretty much everything”.

Her next move appears to be copying Trump’s embrace of religion without being particularly religious himself. Last week, Truss posted on X: “There is hope” while sharing a graph showing that attendance at the UK’s Christian churches has increased among 18- to 24-year-olds. Yet in August 2022, during her Tory leadership campaign, she told a hustings: “I share the values of the Christian faith and the Church of England, but I’m not a regular practising religious person.”

It’s easy to understand why Liz Truss should try to copy the playbook of a man who staged one of the most shocking political comebacks in history. It’s easy too to see how doing that leads her into even more trouble. She lacks Trump’s showmanship and his ease in the public glare. She lacks his ability to connect with and energise a base. Without that, or a sizeable fortune like Trump’s, she lacks his greatest asset – his ability to escape unscathed from the smoking ruins of whatever he has just brought down upon himself.

In short, and to paraphrase an old song, anything Trump can do, Truss can do worse.