Can Gettr Become the Online Gathering Place for Trump’s G.O.P.?

If you’re not familiar with Gettr, the conservative social-media app, you can be forgiven. Its most notable moment had been when the site was hacked on its launch day: July 4, 2021. Since then, it’s toiled in relative anonymity, working hard to be the free-speech alternative to Twitter, or the “Twitter killer,” in the words of Steve Bannon, a frequent Gettr poster.

But the company just had a blockbuster week, reporting seven hundred thousand new users on the site. After Twitter banned both the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account and Robert Malone, a prominent doctor on conservative media, for spreading vaccine misinformation, Joe Rogan joined Gettr. “Just in case shit over at Twitter gets even dumber,” Rogan wrote. “I’m here now as well.” The masses took note.

Before Christmas, I met with Gettr’s C.E.O., Jason Miller, a savvy veteran survivor of both Trump Presidential campaigns. As a senior communications adviser on the 2016 campaign, Miller famously impregnated a fellow-staffer while his own wife was pregnant. A few days before the 2020 election, he claimed that Democrats were “going to try to steal it back.” On January 6th, he reportedly drafted a pair of tweets for Trump, claiming that “the fake news media” was “trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions.” One of the drafts, which was never posted, said, “Our people should head home and let the criminals suffer the consequences!” (Miller, who has been subpoenaed by the January 6th committee, told me, “My lawyers are talking with them.”) I had hoped to meet him at his company’s offices, on Columbus Circle—where “a couple few dozen” people work, Miller said—but the Omicron surge dampened those plans. Instead, we met in a coffee shop’s outdoor shed. Beforehand, a Gettr spokeswoman had assured me—unprompted—that Miller, who arrived in a KN95 mask, was vaccinated and boosted.

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