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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unveiled 🤴🏻🇺🇸💪🏻📜 Wednesday, a social media platform that eschews written posts for strings of pre-approved emoji, which Trump Media described as “removing the literacy bottle neck (sic) from civic discourse.”
Billed as “President Donald Trump’s preferred channel for communicating with his most enthusiastic supporters,” the platform lets a historically excluded segment of users choose from a filtered set of icons—with the bald eagle, gold trophy, and clenched fist listed first—to compose posts that are easy for the community to understand. The app hit 2 million downloads in its first four hours, the bulk of which happened toward the end of that timeframe after hundreds of thousands of adult children came over to teach their parents how to use the app store.
After the Times review ran, Trump reposted it with “🚫📰.” A spokesperson later confirmed the White House is exploring making the platform mandatory for press credentialing.
All non-white-male skin tone and gender variants have been removed from 🤴🏻🇺🇸💪🏻📜’s set of available emojis, with Trump Media citing “discrimination against white men” as the primary reason. “The Asian ones are also racist,” said Kevin J. McGurn, interim CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, while pointing to a printout of the original yellow smiley face.
On top of inclusive variants, about 300 of the roughly 1,400 base emoji have been excluded for allegedly being “woke.” These include LGBTQIA+ glyphs like the pride and transgender flags, disability-related emoji, and the globe, or “round earth” emoji. Many of these have been replaced with new emoji, including a brown-skinned man taking a shovel from a white man, the CNN logo coming out of a dog’s anus, and a German cross.
“Freedom of speech is central to what we’re doing at Trump Media,” said Eric Trump, who then tried to elaborate and, after a long pause, found that he could not.
Greenland and Canada’s flag emojis are both missing.
Additionally, certain image combinations are prohibited. For example, typing “❤️🫏,” “⛳️🇲🇽,” or “👱♂️💋👱🏾♂️” will trigger an immediate replacement with “🪞🚫🧠❄️ 🫏,” which roughly translates to “I’m a libtard” in Literate.
Dr. Helen Marchetti, a professor of digital semiotics at Georgetown, called the platform “either the collapse of written language or the most honest thing social media has produced in a decade,” before declining to say which.
The platform faced its first real foreign policy test four days after Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran — still unreleased to the public, to Senate Republicans, or reportedly to Israel — drew criticism from across the political spectrum over what it failed to say about uranium enforcement.
Trump’s response arrived Tuesday morning as six icons, posted without further comment: 🇮🇷💥💥💥📰🤐. Linguists interpreted it within minutes as a promise to resume bombing Iran if press coverage of the agreement did not improve, a reading a Trump Media spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied, calling the post “open to several interpretations, all of them strong.”
The overwhelming majority of reactions included some combination of 🦅🏆✊🏻, with a smaller but vocal contingent adding 💪🏻🇮🇷💥 in apparent agreement, several appending a parenthetical 🙏🏻 to indicate they were either praying for the outcome or advocating for wrath from God himself.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s account replied in full sentences: “Releasing the text of the agreement is easier than another war. Try that first.”
The reply registered almost no engagement beyond confusion. Within twenty minutes, the thread carried more than 60,000 replies of “❓❓❓,” along with accounts asking whether Newsom’s post had been a hack (🪓💻), a glitch (🐛⚡), or “one of those AI things” (🤖✨). One account, profile picture a photo of a goat in a kayak, attempted a sincere reply using only 👂🏻☀️ 🚫🧠❄️ 🫏, or “let’s hear the California libtard out,” which was flagged with a community note that read “🦏” (“Republican In Name Only”).
By Wednesday evening, Trump had not bombed Iran, and the deal’s text had still not been released, a coincidence Trump Media’s press office attributed to “ongoing translation efforts.”
Trump Media’s stock rose a striking 340 percent to $4.97 in early trading, which a Bloomberg analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity attributed largely to “illiterate investors.”
