He’s baaack. Former President Donald Trump returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, for the first time in almost three years following his arrest in Georgia on Thursday on charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election.
The 45th president posted his Fulton County mugshot along with the words “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and “NEVER SURRENDER!” Trump also posted his campaign website, donaldjtrump.com.
He was back with his original account: @realDonaldTrump.
Right beneath that tweet about his arrest, on the social media platform now called X by owner Elon Musk, were the last two tweets Trump offered before getting tossed off the platform. He posted those just after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In the news: Trump Departs Georgia After Being Booked In Fulton County
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” Trump tweeted on the morning of Jan. 8, 2021.
About an hour later, he added, “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter permanently banned Trump later that day. It became part of a broad ban by all social media platforms, and fueled the development of Trump’s own platform, Truth Social.
At the time he got the boot from Twitter, for allegedly inciting the Capitol riot, the former president had roughly 88 million followers. Some commentators considered his ubiquitous presence on Twitter as a pivotal factor in his 2016 upset of Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
As The Free Press reported last December, Twitter’s management at the time banned Trump even though the company’s internal content-safety team determined that he had done nothing wrong.
In the news: Florida Republican Byron Donalds Condemns Trump Arrest “Continued Weaponization”
“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” one unnamed staffer wrote in judging Trump’s tweets that day.
“It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday [Jan. 6].”
The revelation of Twitter’s internal debate over Trump’s eventual ban came to light with Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files,” a trove of internal documents the billionaire made public to show the previous management’s bias against conservatives and willingness to squelch free speech.
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