Twitter Permanently Bans President Donald Trump

By Yehudit Garmaise

    After Twitter revealed that “Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021,” on Friday, the social media giant banned President Trump’s account permanently.

    As part of its explanation for shutting down President Trump’s account that was followed by at least 89 million people, Twitter said that Trump’s Friday tweet that he was not planning to attend the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden might give rioters license to converge on Washington once again.

    Twitter’s decision came two days after a pro-Trump mob forced its way into the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday to violently disrupt the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory by pillaging and vandalizing the U.S. House of Representatives.

    The mob had just attended a rally on the Ellipse in Washington, DC, in which President Trump claimed that he won the 2020 election “by a landslide,” and that his supporters, should “stop the steal.”

    “This was not a close election,” said President Trump, who appears to not be able to see the realities not only that he lost the election, but that election fraud was not found after multiple investigations by election officials and federal investigators.

    “I’ve been in two elections. I won them both and the second one, I won much bigger than the first,” said President Trump, during his long, rambling speech in which he attempted to lay out his "evidence" of election fraud, with which no election officials or federal investigators concur, just before a crowd of his supporters turned into a mob that ended with five people dead.

     At the end of his speech, the president said, “So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.

    “We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

     On Thursday, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg also announced he had also banned the president from using the social media platform, but only until after he leaves office on Jan. 20. Zuckerberg said that Trump had used his platform to “condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters.”

(Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)