Trump logs in

Former President Trump is back on X just in time for next week's Democratic National Convention.

• He's already at eight posts, up from one over the past three years.

Why it matters: Trump's Truth Social posts never landed with the impact of his old tweets. Now he's returned to the platform that helped him dominate America's headlines for 6+ years.

• This fits the strategy Axios' Sophia Cai identified last year of using a Trump return to help offset a bad news cycle.
• "I'm back on X for a short time," Trump told supporters in a campaign email today.

🚨 The big winner of a more significant Trump return to X would be Elon Musk, who is interviewing the former president tonight.

• Trump and Musk personally negotiated the interview, a Trump adviser told Semafor.

Between the lines: For all the bad press it's gotten over content moderation and its owner's politics, X is still a monster platform for rapid-fire news and meme generation.

• "The same campaign ad posted around the same time on both platforms Monday attracted 172,000 likes on X within two hours, compared with less than 9,000 on Truth Social," the Washington Post reported.

The bottom line: Trump's interview tonight is his third shot at stealing the spotlight from the largely positive coverage enjoyed by the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign.

• Trump's press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week spawned days of headlines over his emergency helicopter landing story.
• The week before, he questioned Harris' racial identity before a convention of Black journalists.