Devin Nunes of TRUTH Social: Inside Trump World

BUCK: We have with us now Devin Nunes. He is former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and CEO of the Trump Media & Technology Group. Devin, great to have you on the program.

NUNES: Hey, it’s great to be with you guys. Thanks for having me.

BUCK: I want to ask you before we get into the latest social media platform battles, the fight for free speech, major issues that we are talking about here day in and day out there’s the Sussmann trial going on right now. You were on the forefront of trying to get to the truth of Russia collusion. This lawyer Sussmann was the guy who allegedly lied to the FBI as part of the origins of the Russia collusion story. Do you have any hope for justice here? And what do you want people to know about Sussmann’s role in getting all of that anti-Trump Russia nonsense going?

NUNES: Well, first off, there’s a little bit of breaking news here just in the last few minutes and that is that one of… There’s already a problem with a contaminated jury in terms of Clinton supporters, AOC supporters, obviously you have the whole Washington, D.C., cesspool where you have 95% of the people there didn’t vote for Donald Trump. But with that said, now we have a juror that Durham moved to remove because the daughter of the juror is friends with Sussmann’s daughter!

So, this has just become a complete cesspool where you’ve got the judge’s wife is a lawyer for Lisa Page who was one of the lovebirds involved at the DOJ and FBI, part of the dirty cop cabal. So, Durham really has his work to do. This is really just a thin sliver of the entire conspiracy, and it deals just with Sussmann. So, all of these cast of characters were involved, right? So we made…

During our investigation that broke all this open, we made 14 criminal referrals involving dozens of people. Durham brought something just very narrow, and it appears like, I mean, from just outside looking in now that this is just getting to be a ridiculous uphill climb for John Durham because of all these incestuous relationships that you have in the Beltway there.

CLAY: We appreciate you coming on, Congressman. And we know that obviously there’s been, in addition to all the craziness going on with the Russia collusion hoax and everything surrounding it and how it became a story, Twitter, obviously, and Elon Musk has been at the top of many people’s minds, including what Donald Trump may or may not do if Elon Musk makes this acquisition and great news control and invites the president back on Twitter.

I think he said that he wouldn’t use it. Would it actually benefit TRUTH Social in your mind if the president did use Twitter and link back every time that he sent out a tweet and said, “Oh, by the way, you should also come and sign up,” he’s got 85 million or whatever he had Twitter users, or, in your mind, should Trump only use TRUTH Social? Kind of see and discuss from your perspective the interplay between those two social networks.

NUNES: Yeah, I think one of the challenges we have here is that you’ve got 95% of the media is completely fake. And so largely what myself and Donald Trump have been saying since I took the helm of the company here in January and launched this product through a beta period where we had Apple. Now just yesterday we’re wide open. Anybody can go to TRUTHSocial.com and sign up.

Despite what’s been written and very clear, we’re supportive of Elon Musk buying Twitter. We think Twitter is a cesspool. We also think it’s a house of cards; there’s just not very many people there, and I know that kind of flies in the face of what people see and read. But I would just ask anyone to just go to any family function where there’s somebody who’s not a Hollywood celebrity, not in politics, and not in journalism and ask their family members, “Do you have a Twitter account that’s active?”

And my guess is it’s gonna be somewhere around 1% to 3% of your family members are going to have an active Twitter account. So we don’t care about Twitter. It’s a global PR wire. That’s not the business model we’re building. We have a place that is open, uncancelable. We built it without Big Tech, and we are bringing together people where they’re having a good time because we’ve opened the ability to open the internet back up for people to social network.

So I understand what you guys are asking, but Twitter is a ghost town. And we already know that. We’re at our nascent stage, right? I mean, we have barely begun. Donald Trump is getting close to three million followers on the platform. And for those people who have been engaged on this platform from the beginning, nearly all of them are blowing away their engagement on Twitter.

Twitter’s not even relevant for our company. But I think what is relevant for our company is Instagram. There is no question Instagram is a powerhouse, along with TikTok. TikTok has more of probably the ages of 25 and under. Instagram is very heavily very heavily used from that 25 to 54 demographic that I know you guys are very familiar with. So we are building our product to take the best of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook and put it into a place where you are not going to be censored for your (garbled audio).

BUCK: Uh-oh. Devin, we’re talking technology and technology’s failing us right now ’cause we can’t really hear you. Let’s see if he can try one more time here. You were telling us about what your competitors are doing and what the market, what the landscape is like right now for people to be able to share their ideas. I think we might have loss Devin, which is not what we were hoping for at this point in time.

But obviously we’ll see if we can get him back in a moment here. Look. I think that the TRUTH Social platform, Clay, if anything, can just learn from what went wrong with Twitter. Obviously, it’s Trump and the people involved in it are pro-free speech and there’s gonna be a lot of conservatives who are on the platform, but one of my concerns stretching back for a long time was… Oh, do we have Devin again?

NUNES: Sorry about that, guys.

BUCK: Yeah, we’re gonna have get like a Wi-Fi call, my friend. You’ve got a few million peep listening to you so go ahead.

NUNES: I wouldn’t think I am on a Wi-Fi call. That’s what’s so concerning.

BUCK: Well, it’s a Soros conspiracy. Tell us what you were saying.

NUNES: (chuckles) Well, I think the bottom line is is that our business model is based off of one that takes advantage of Instagram and TikTok and Twitter is not something that we spend much time worrying about because it’s just not a platform that has very many users on it. It’s a home of bot farms, and I think Elon Musk has said that pretty clearly.

CLAY: Congressman… By the way, Buck and I are both on TRUTH Social so if people are listening right now and they want to go download TRUTH Social you can find certainly President Trump, you can find the congressman, you can find Buck and I. What opportunity is out there, in your mind? You talked about trying to combine the best of Instagram with Twitter in creating a new dynamic there.

How underserved do you think the marketplace is for people who are just seeking sanity? Our new tag line on this show — and I think it’s accurate — is that we’re sane in an insane world, and I think there’s just this desperate demand for sanity. And I think a lot of people, frankly, would like Donald Trump back because compared to Joe Biden, he’s an extremely sane genius.

NUNES: Yeah, I mean, Donald Trump’s never going back to Twitter —

CLAY: Yeah.

NUNES: — because there’s no reason for us to go to Twitter, and I know that’s hard for people to understand because of the fake users out there, but it’s just a useless platform. I mean, with that said, I want to be clear like, we’re for opening the internet. If Elon Musk buys it, that’s great, that’s phenomenal. But we have already established with millions of Americans a place where people are having fun, they’re social networking, they’re not gonna be canceled by Big Tech.

Our challenge moving forward is going to be able to create some of the features that Instagram and TikTok have so that we can break into that larger marketplace. So we’re gonna get people… Everyone is gonna be on our platform who’s been disenfranchised with the Facebooks and the Instagrams and the Twitters, maybe they’ve been banned. But for us to get that, reach that next level of people who maybe aren’t as concerned about politics or haven’t been politically censored, we’re gonna have to have both a quality product and a reliable product. And that’s what we’re building at TRUTH Social.

BUCK: We’re speaking to former congressman Devin Nunes right now. He’s the CEO of the Trump media group, talking about TRUTH Social. What is the fundamental promise that TRUTH and any other media entities that you’re gonna be involved in running will make to the user in terms of transparency, in terms of rules of the road, how are you guys gonna be different from what we’ve already seen?

NUNES: Well, I think, first of all, if you take the fact that we are cancelable, right; so we’re not gonna have a Bezos or a Bill Gates or somebody who decides they don’t like us for political reasons. They just can’t come in and cut the cords on us because we’re using the Rumble cloud, which I know you guys are also on Rumble. So that’s a big advantage that we have, not to mention we’re not trying to force-feed you an algorithm.

So our feed — and I think this is important for those people who spent any time on it — is chronological. So if Buck posts something at 2 p.m. and I post something at 3 and Clay posts something at 4, that’s the order it’s gonna appear in your feed. So we’re not trying to build an algorithm off your past use like these other companies do to force feed you stuff, which, look.

On a good day you can say, “Oh, they’re just trying to have an algorithm that helps you out.” But I think what we really know is these companies are controlled by far-left political hacks with an agenda where conservatives and people in the middle, if you say anything that they politically disagree with, you’re being either shadow banned or censored.

CLAY: So where do we go from here from the perspective of the impact of social media going forward? Are you convinced that the impact of social media is going to continue to grow, or do you think we’ve reached the high-water mark in terms of media being obsessed with Twitter, in terms of media being obsessed with Instagram? Where do we go from here? What’s social media 2.0 or 3.0, in your mind?

NUNES: Yeah, I think, you know what? That’s a very good question, and it’s one that we think about all the time. Right? I think people will continue to use social media because people have phones and iPads and they’re connected all of the time. But if it’s not a family friendly place that’s not just stealing your data, where people are having a good time and they can get information, that’s, I think, the recipe for success.

The only thing you have to do is watch what Project Veritas did, came out within the last couple days. If you are full of employees who are clearly communist or have Marxist views, who are literally trying to destroy the company for their views I think that’s not a place people are gonna want to be. And that’s why Twitter, despite what everybody… You know, it does have a brand, but it’s a brand… That’s why I call it a house of cards. There’s just nobody there, and I think that’s what Elon Musk has figured out.

And I think Instagram and Facebook both have that problem, and my gut feeling — and I’m just going back on polling that I did when I was running for Congress and also just anecdotal evidence, I think Facebook is starting to face some of those headwinds. It would not surprise me now that Facebook has a lot of dead accounts. I think Instagram is right at that level where they’re there but we’re not sure that they’re really increasing.

I think a lot of that demographic that 25 to 54 demographic, they like Instagram. And they’re given us an opportunity to get into that marketplace if we can build enough features that can compete with Instagram, right? We’ve got a long way to go because they’ve got a decade head start on us. But we believe that that’s where the market is going, to a product that people feel comfortable with, that’s reliable, where they have fun. And I think that’s what you’ll see.

People who spend any time on our platform and you see that all the new people that have joined here in the last few days because we opened up — anybody can now get on in the United States if you just go to TRUTHSocial.com — what we’re seeing is people like, “Oh, my gosh. This is fun over here,” because there’s all these people that got banned from the other platforms who are super-cool.

Guys, I never even heard of some of these people and I’m like, “Oh, my God. Where has this guy been? They’re super talented.” They’re making memes’ they’re putting pictures. It’s just a fun place, and it has a good vibe about it. And our challenge will be to move beyond kind of the news and politics and get into where people go there for art and movies and sports and things of that nature.

CLAY: Congressman Devin Nunes — formerly congressman, now running TRUTH Social — I want to let you know Clay and Buck also has an account there. You can search out my name, Clay Travis. You can search out Buck Sexton. You can look up @ClayAndBuck. We appreciate the time. Good luck with building the business.

NUNES: Hey, guys, it’s great to be on with you. Congratulations on your success also.

CLAY: Thank you so much. We appreciate that. We’ll talk to you again soon, I’m sure.