Donald Trump, the former president, launched his Twitter knockoff social media platform and app late Sunday night.

Called Truth Social, the platform has already been ridiculed after countless attempted users tried to sign up, only to be told “something went wrong,” or that they have been waitlisted.

At least one social media user noticed the logo for Trump’s newest venture, like the app itself, seems to be a knockoff. The logo is quite similar to a British solar energy company’s.

But it is also strange that a former president and supposed billionaire wasn’t able to secure the company’s name on Twitter.

@TruthSocial on Twitter is currently held by a company that created the account more than a decade ago, posted one tweet that year – 2010 – and does not appear to have tweeted since.

There are ways to request a Twitter handle that’s dormant for a long period of time, and if that doesn’t work it likely would be possible to try to pay the “owner” of that handle for it.

It appears the original @TruthSocial owners were in control of the truthsocial.com domain, as it’s listed in their profile.

Instead, Trump – or his Truth Social CEO, the far right former U.S. Congressman Devin Nunes – opted to open @TruthSocials as their Twitter handle. After more than 12 hours Trump’s new app has just 345 followers.

As part of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Administration officials have admitted that it would take too much effort to reunite families the government separated before it implemented its zero-tolerance policy towards asylum seekers and others that the government enacted last April.

The administration also does not refute a report from the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services released in January that claims “thousands” more families had been separated that had previously been mentioned, and that family separations were ongoing prior to the formal introduction of the policies that have led to 2,800 children being separated from their families from April to June of 2018. 

HHS has also said that they simply do not know how many children have been separated from their parents — and that because no one implemented any form of record keeping on these separations, it would be an undue “burden” to do so.

Jallyn Sualog,  deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said that, “In my judgment, ORR does not have the requisite staff for such a project,” indicating that it would take 100 analysis from the ORR without full eight-hour days somewhere between 7-15 months to “even begin reconciling” the requisite data.

“The Trump administration’s response is a shocking concession that it can’t easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents and doesn’t even think it’s worth the time to locate each of them,” said ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt, via a statement. “The administration also doesn’t dispute that separations are ongoing in significant numbers.”

A Federal Court required that the government reunify all separated families with 30 days last June. By September, the government told the court it has reunified or released 2,167 of the total 2,551 children under 5 that had been separated from parents. It is unclear how many more children may now me wholly lost within the system.

Public Domain image by US Customs and BorderPatrol via Wikimedia Commons 

In a discussion on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) claims it is “premature” to ask for a transcript from a translator who attended a private meeting between President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. 

The Washington Post reported yesterday that there exists no detailed record of the five meetings the president has had with the Russian President, and that Trump has gone to “extraordinary lengths” to prevent any word of his discussions become public. This included confiscating the notes of the interpreter, and disallowing them from discussing the meetings with anyone else, including other officials in the administration.

Questions have swirled around Trump and his connections with Russia since his campaign, with the FBI, and later Robert Mueller, actively examining ties between the President and the government of Russia.

Never the less, Cruz remains nonplussed, feeling that it is “premature” to subpoena the translator’s notes. 

“I think it’s premature for that,” said Cruz. “I’ve seen the allegations. I want to find out a little bit more about what happened there. I want to learn more than just the allegations in the press.”

“Listen, I would say if you compare, objectively, President Trump’s policies to Russia to President Obama’s policies to Russia, by any measure, President Obama was much easier — was much more gentle on Russia,” added Cruz.

Trump  did sign a bill passed through congress in 2017, designed to enforce sanctions against Russia, only to bypass the deadline to enact those same sanctions. He has also moved to reduce US presence in Syria, seem as a move that will benefit Russia and their allies over US interests.

Cruz ran against Trump in the 2016 election, and was at the receiving end of some of the president’s  sharpest barbs. Trump promoted a conspiracy theory that Cruz’s own father had a hand in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and also attacked the appearance of his wife. 

Nevertheless, Cruz has shown himself to be loyal to Trump as president.

View the full exchange below:

Image via screen capture from video source.