What did Donald Trump do today?

He fixated on his social media stats.

Trump posted an image to his private social media network today, bragging about his TikTok views.

"McDonald's Content" refers to an October campaign stunt in which a Republican donor closed a McDonald's franchise and let Trump pretend to work the drive-thru window and cook French fries. It certainly made for compelling social media content, but it wasn't generally well received by Americans who actually have to work in the service industry for a living.

Trump created "Garbage Truck Content" the following week during a campaign stop in Wisconsin built around a Trump-branded garbage truck. It came a few days after a Trump rally in NYC when a pro-Trump speaker called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage," which infuriated Americans with ties to Puerto Rico. The campaign refused to disavow the remarks. Trump has had a rocky relationship with the island since his administration botched relief efforts after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

It's reasonable to ask why Trump—who was running for president, and therefore generating hashtags that used his name or clicks on media about him whether he wanted to or not—thinks any of this matters. "Truth Social" is an enormous financial windfall for Trump himself—if not most of its investors—but as a company, it has virtually no revenue, a pathetically small user base, and no real assets other than the promise of Trump's continued posting. And since Trump's posts are covered in the media anyway, or at free mirror sites like this one, there's no strong incentive for new customers to pay for access.

But Trump—whose biggest job success by far was his work as a reality show host—has a history of obsession with TV ratings and other popularity metrics, and when they didn't say what he wanted them to say, he's never hesitated to make them up. In another post today, he gleefully celebrated poor post-election ratings for MSNBC, so he may just have had ratings on his mind.

Six weeks from the start of his second term, Trump's "honeymoon" period has him with underwater approval ratings.

Why does this matter?

• There are probably more important things for a president-elect to be worrying about than how many times someone watched a video of him stumbling as he tried to get into a garbage truck.

• The presidency of the United States is not about providing "content."