Donald Trump Has Made A Decision About Twitter After Elon Musk Purchase
With Elon Musk set to purchase Twitter many have wondered whether Donald Trump would soon be returning to the social media platform
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On Monday, in a somewhat surprising move, Twitter agreed to Elon Musk’s offer of purchase and the social media platform will now be owned by the Tesla and SpaceX founder. It is somewhat unprecedented considering the context and now there are a number of questions about the future of the site and how it will operate moving forward. Elon Musk, for his part, has been adamant that his buying Twitter was to protect free speech on the platform. And that got people wondering about what would happen with Donald Trump there, whether the former president would make a return to his Tweeting ways. If he would be reinstated after being banned more than a year ago. It seems that Trump has preemptive thoughts along those lines.
While talking with Fox News (via Futurism), Donald Trump was asked about whether he would campaign to have his Twitter account turned back on now that Elon Musk was going to be the owner of the social media platform. Trump, at least for now, didn’t seem to want any part of the move saying, that he would instead be solely be using the Truth Social platform which was created by the Trump Media & Technology Group. While Donald Trump hasn’t technically kicked off his use of the platform that his group, in fact, founded, it doesn’t seem like for the time being that he has any intentions of getting back to his tweeting ways. Check out what he had to say:
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH. I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.”
Whether Donald Trump holds firm to this claim and intention remains to be seen. After all, this was a guy who leveraged Twitter in about the most self-promoting way possible, amassing a massive following and in some ways tweeting his way to the Presidency. He was incredibly active on the platform and used it with fervor leading up to and even during his time in the Oval Office. There was much contention around how much a sitting president should be using Twitter at the time, but there’s no doubt Donald Trump made it work for him from a political perspective. He had 89 million followers at the time of his removal from the platform and according to some of the data, tweeted nearly 35 times a day during his time in office.
But Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in the wake of the January 6th riots at the Capitol, in the final days of his Presidency. After going on a number of social media platforms questioning the integrity of the election, most saw fit to take the guy off and he was removed from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. That has remained the case since and in the meantime he and his team had created Truth Social, a competing platform that is said to uphold the virtues of free speech. That launched back in late February. It’s available only through the Apple app store at this time.
With Elon Musk purchasing Twitter for $44 billion dollars and saying he wants to uphold the ideas of free speech on the platform, it did make folks wonder whether Donald Trump would end up being reinstated. At least for now, it looks like the latter won’t be making a return, likely to help prop up the business on Truth social and convert followers to that platform instead. But time will tell if that lasts. The number of followers and the influence he had on Twitter was nearly unmatched and it’s hard to believe he’d be able to stay away for long if given the chance to start tweeting once again.
