Do you regularly check Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform? Unless you’re a faithful Trump supporter or a journalist who covers the former president, Chris Herbert would bet that you probably don’t. That’s why Herbert—a web developer based in DC—and his team at the conservative, anti-Trump nonprofit Defending Democracy Together created Trump’s Truth, a database that tracks all of the content that Trump posts to Truth Social. Users of the site, which launched today, can search Trump’s Truth by keyword, filter the results by date, and access content that Trump has deleted from his page.  Trump’s Truth was conceived back in April, when Herbert noticed a number of factors that made Truth Social difficult to monitor. For one thing, its content doesn’t feed into Google search results like tweets or Instagram posts do. Its search engine is not very advanced. Trump deletes posts fairly frequently. And, according to Herbert, the site’s most glaring deficiency is that it doesn’t offer video transcripts or image descriptions: Many of Trump’s posts contain videos and photos, but without text content attached to these uploads, there hasn’t been a way to for search engines to index them up to this point.  “By transcribing it, I think I really am offering an interesting service to people who want to see what [Trump] is saying without literally having to sit through a 20-minute video—and there’s thousands of them,” Herbert says. While Trump gets a lot of media coverage in general, Herbert noticed that most of what he says on Truth Social flies under the public’s radar. He attributes that, in part, to the site’s comparatively small reach. “I think a lot of people don’t go there because, unless you really are only interested in what Donald Trump has to say, it’s not a place where you’re going to hang out with your friends or learn about current events the way that Twitter is or Facebook is,” Herbert says. But Herbert does think that the American public largely would find Trump’s Truth Social posts interesting, and he hopes that his database will make that content more accessible. “The way that he speaks on Truth Social is really different than the way he talks on his newly reactivated Twitter account. It’s very candid. He’s talking to his base. He doesn’t talk like a normal president or former president, and so it’s just really important, I think, for people to see that, and for journalists and researchers to have resources where they can search it.” This isn’t Herbert’s first foray into archiving political content—he developed the Archive of Political emails in 2019, which contains more than 1.5 million political fundraising and advocacy emails, organized by factors like the sender’s political party and location. He felt that these messages were important to the historical record, but people who aren’t subscribed to a given mailing list have no way of viewing the content.  Maybe those old fundraising emails aren’t interesting for people to read today, but he thinks they can offer something valuable later on. One thing is for sure: If future historians dive into the 2020s, the database will offer them plenty of information to sort through.The post Want to Search Donald Trump’s Truth Social Posts? A New Site Is Here to Help. first appeared on Washingtonian.