Days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump last month, Ben Wolfgram, the president of a family-run glassware business in Wisconsin, started advertising a new product on Facebook: a whiskey tumbler with a bullet sticking out of it. It was inscribed with the words “Bulletproof Trump.”
Within an hour, Facebook had removed the advertisement for violating its prohibition on political content in ads. So Mr. Wolfgram turned to Truth Social, the social network owned by one of Mr. Trump’s companies, paying $7,500 to run about five variations of his ad over a week. Truth Social posted them without any questions.
Mr. Trump’s site “was a lot more lenient,” said Mr. Wolfgram, whose company, BenShot, is based in Appleton. His ads were seen more than one million times.
Five months after going public, Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, has revealed little about how it plans to build its business. But an examination by The New York Times found that the company, which is a major source of Mr. Trump’s wealth, is increasingly reliant on revenue from an obscure corner of the ad market: a niche, sometimes called “the patriotic economy,” that caters to hard-core Trump fans and Christian conservatives.
In effect, Trump Media’s business is financed by right-wing merchants with relatively small ad budgets, including some that have been kicked off other social media platforms or are trying to jump on the Trump bandwagon. It has created what amounts to a closed-loop ecosystem: a Trump-centric site that depends on many ads by and for Trump loyalists. That contrasts with larger social networks, like Facebook and X, which run ads from Fortune 500 companies like Disney and Walmart, raising questions about how much Trump Media can grow.