Trump is back, as sad as an Aznavour song

Few things appear as melancholic as the return of Donald Trump on Facebook and Instagram. Not even a song by Aznavour has that effect on me: remember “How sad Venice is, only one year later…”. Well, just two years have passed since he was banned by Mark Zuckerberg himself and what then seemed, and to all intents and purposes was, a threat to national and ultimately global security, today elicits at most a few distracted yawns. It’s like when you invite the guy you kicked out to a big party because he behaved badly even though he was very popular.

You invite him back not because he’s sorry, not because he apologized, but maybe just because you hope he’ll try to put some enthusiasm back in the air. Like in American theaters where, if things go badly and the show doesn’t work, the boss orders the clowns to be staged. Send in the clowns, let’s have fun again. But in the meantime the party is over, the few remaining are hovering around what remains of the buffet with a bored air and even the outcast has aged, maybe it’s no longer scary, but it doesn’t seem that interesting either. Things change fast.

At the end of 2020 Facebook was still the most important social network, the tool capable of tilting an electoral dispute to one side or the other; and Trump had half of the American voters by his side, after leading the United States for four years, he had lost to Biden yes, but by a whisker. Now web users now spend their time on TikTok, the metaverse envisioned by Zuckerberg appears as empty as a station at night and even Republican voters seem to prefer other leaders.

Of course we are talking in the absence of a real comeback of Donald Trump, which however is not obvious as seen on Twitter: a few months ago Elon Musk had readmitted him on his favorite social network but the former president was careful not to tweet . Will he do it? Will he return to using social networks to feed the electoral campaign for 2024? It is possible, but the real dilemma for Trump is not being able to use TikTok because when he was a US resident he even wanted to ban it because he was Chinese. In short, the feeling is that an era has ended, for Facebook, for Twitter and also for Trump, for whom a biting joke by Alberto Sordi comes to mind: “America’, Tarzan faces”, that the party is fading.