Trump Will Return to Twitter
Trump will be making an announcement later tonight and it's expected he's going to officially announce his return to Twitter- jk he's probably running for president. This is on the heels of a poor performance from both election deniers and Trump backed nominees in the mid terms. I'm cautiously optimistic Trumpism is behind us. Average Americans are smarter than the media and elites give them credit for. They know bullshit when they see it, even if it takes a little bit. Quickly, a lot of people read my blog and listen to my podcast and think I'm some kind of radical right Trumper. Let me be clear, the man is a cancer and I went on record supporting Biden in the Democratic primary because he had the best shot at beating Trump. Having said that I do think many on the left simply write off Trump voters as a bunch of racists or "bag of deplorables" without doing an ounce of introspection as to what is wrong with their own party. This mindset by the left is applied to the Republican party as a whole as well, and I think it is misguided. There is more to the Republican party than simply election deniers and Trump sycophants. It's more complicated than the Dems being "good" and the Republicans being "evil." I don't give a shit what party a candidate is a part of, I asses them based on their beliefs on issues that matter. I went on record supporting some Democratic candidates and some Republican candidates in my California voter guide. Now that that's out of the way.
Trump just isn't getting his jollies on his Twitter replacement Truth Social. He uses it much like he used Twitter but no one gives a shit. People aren't talking about him nearly as much as they were when he was on Twitter. I think given the latest election and given the power of DeSantis, he's going to need to pull out all the stops. With that here is my prediction (you can track my other predictions here): Trump will return to Twitter. He will swallow his pride and happily join again. And I believe that under Elon's leadership, Twitter will allow him to come back. Remember, he was "permanently suspended" on January 8th following the attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The tweets that were cause for his suspension were the following: “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!!!” and “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” You can read more about Twitter's rationale here, but basically these tweets in the context of the attack on the Capitol were viewed as a call to violence and denial of a fair peaceful transition of power.
Listen, this is a complicated issue, but I think he should be allowed to return to Twitter and other social platforms. We should know what our candidates are thinking and the notion we should normalize private companies deciding who has a voice is far scarier than allowing some people we think are bad to tweet. I still think it was the right call to suspend him at the time. Of course I am extremely skeptical of a company or group of companies (YouTube and Facebook banned him too) being able to silence a democratically elected politician. But it's a feature not a bug that we live in a country where a company can decide to kick off a public official. Of course the precedent for this is scary, but I'll tell you this, no public officials are getting kicked off any platform in an unfree country like China. That's because Chinese companies are simply viewed as extensions of the state whereas in America, private individuals and institutions have rights, they have power outside the state. There is perhaps no greater example of this than the deplatforming of a sitting US president. Long USA.
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