It's Rico Daily, I'm Adam Clark Estes.

This past president's day, Donald Trump Jr. posted a screenshot of what looked like a tweet,

but it wasn't quite.

It was from his father and it read, get ready, your favorite president will see you soon.

Since being banned from Twitter last year, the former president has long promised a Trump

branded Twitter competitor and it has finally arrived, sort of.

It was glitchy, people couldn't make accounts, the confirmation emails weren't showing

up in people's email inboxes, and even there was an outage for about 13 hours.

That's McKenna Kelly, the policy reporter for The Verge, and she's here to tell us about

the origins and launch of Truth Social.

McKenna, thanks for joining us.

Hi, it's good to be here.

I wonder if you could give us a little bit of info on the run-up and why Donald Trump

wanted to create a Twitter competitor to begin with?

There's a need for him to have a social media platform now.

During the January 6th riots last year, he was finally taken off Twitter after years of

running really, really close to breaking the terms of service.

It took that last kind of point with people entering the capital and causing mass destruction

for him to be taken down.

Ever since then, he's kind of been without that megaphone that he's always had.

I think even over the last year, you can kind of tell there's been a real hole in Republican

messaging ever since he's been banned.

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