Donald Trump spent late night on Truth Social firing off more than two dozen posts in 38 minutes, and roughly half of them were aimed at Barack Obama. From 10:15 to 10:53 p.m. EDT, Trump and his allies flooded the account with accusations that Obama had committed treason, tried to stage a coup, used Hillary Clinton’s email server under a pseudonym and personally collected $120 million from the Affordable Care Act.
The rest of the barrage went after Mark Kelly, James Comey, Jack Smith and Hillary Clinton, with Trump wishing those targets would be arrested and demanding that the Justice Department move faster to apprehend them or others. In one post, Trump wrote: “I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”
The posting spree mattered not just for its volume, but for what it skipped. Trump said nothing about the Iran war he is currently waging, even as the economic effects of that conflict have become his party’s biggest political liability. Instead, he returned to a familiar online pattern: grievance, retaliation and a search for enemies, wrapped in a stream of accusations that stretched from the former president to his old legal and political foes.
That pattern is not new. Trump has had periodic social-media crashouts before, and he has long shown a fixation on Black Americans as a source of crime. Some of the videos he reposted overnight appeared to show Black people misbehaving in public, part of a thread that mixed race-baiting material with the other attacks. The Obama accusations also fit a recurring Trump habit of treating his targets as reflections of himself, while the charge about the Affordable Care Act appears to have originated on a satirical website.
Only one message in the series was written by Trump himself. The rest were reposts from apparent supporters, which gave the burst a useful split-screen quality: a president who said he was now the hunter, and a feed that did much of the hunting for him. At a moment when he has also been using social media to try to scare Iranians or reassure oil markets, the overnight barrage showed how far the account has become an extension of his political warfare.
The question now is not whether Trump will keep posting; he almost certainly will. It is whether the Justice Department, already the focus of his demands, will feel any new pressure to act faster on the people he names, or whether this latest late night blast will become just another item in a long feed of threats that never quite turn into action.
