Nicolle Wallace joked with fellow MS NOW anchor Chris Hayes this week that Truth Social is President Trump’s “padded room.”
Hayes appeared as a guest on the Monday edition of Wallace’s “The Best People” podcast. During their conversation, Wallace shared her frustration with the mainstream media’s lack of active coverage of the president’s social media rants and posting sprees. She noted that, if a prominent actor or athlete posted online like Trump does, it would make headlines.
“If any actor at the top of their game — he’s president, he’s at the top of our politics — were posting all night, it would be a story in the entertainment press,” Wallace argued. “They would have to cover it, and the political press rarely covers his overnight screeds.” Her comment prompted Hayes to share a theory about one of the reasons why Trump may have won re-election in 2024.
“I have a theory that one of the best things for Trump and one of the things that allowed him to win in 2024 was getting kicked off Twitter and going to Truth Social,” Hayes said. “[Because] you don’t see it. It’s like someone having a psychotic episode where they scream into a pillow.”
“Truth Social is like his padded room!” Wallace said in response, laughing.
Hayes noted that Trump’s move to Truth Social took his social media rants out of the spotlight and the mainstream public’s collective consciousness.
“I think that when it was on Twitter … when everyone was there, it was like being in a subway car with a person who’s having a breakdown,” Hayes explained. “But then we all moved to a different subway car, and he’s just in there! And I think it helps him. I really do think it helps him.”
“Are our brains already broken? In that the Commander-in-Chief, the guy with his fingers on the codes, posts all night and it’s barely news?” Wallace asked.
“I really think this comes down to something super fundamental about us as humans,” Hayes replied. “We’re the only species that can live in the Amazon and the Arctic, and the reason we can do that is we can acclimate to anything.”
“That fundamentally is the issue,” he concluded. “He’s just done it enough that we’ve acclimated.”
