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- Elon Musk on Saturday reinstated former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
- Musk polled Twitter users about whether to bring back the account, with 51% of respondents voting “yes.”
- Trump was banned after the January 6 Capitol riot, but Musk said he would “reverse the permaban.”
Elon Musk on Saturday reinstated former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The billionaire owner of Twitter had posed the question to his followers in a poll.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk wrote in a tweet, using a Latin phrase that translates to “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
The announcement came a day after Musk polled his followers with a simple prompt of “Reinstate Trump.” As of Saturday evening, the poll showed 51.8% of respondents voted “Yes” while 48.2% voted “No.”
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2022
Representatives for Twitter and Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
The reinstatement comes nearly two years after Trump was kicked off the platform following the deadly January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Trump’s return to Twitter was widely anticipated after Tesla CEO Elon Musk closed a $44 billion deal to buy the company.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” Musk said at a Financial Times conference in May. “I think that was a mistake. It alienated the country and did not result in Donald Trump not having a voice. I think it was a morally bad decision and foolish in the extreme.”
He added that he would “reverse the permaban” if he owned Twitter. Shortly after the purchase was finalized, Musk fired four top Twitter executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal and legal and public policy head Vijaya Gadde.
According to The Guardian, as the person in charge of legal and policy affairs at the site, Gadde has been most closely associated with the company’s decision to ban Trump after the Capitol riot.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said in a statement at the time.
Though the former president’s access to Twitter has been reinstated, it’s unclear if he’ll choose to return.
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News in April, referring to the website Truth Social. “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.”
“The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter,” he added.
On Saturday, before the reinstatement was announced, Trump shared the link to Musk’s poll on Truth Social, saying: “Vote now with positivity, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere. Truth Social is special!”
Trump’s critics have speculated that if he does return to Twitter, he would likely continue using the platform as a megaphone to spread election conspiracy theories, attack election officials and members of the judiciary, and possibly incite his followers into committing violence.
The former president maintains he was the true winner of the 2020 election. That’s despite the fact that his legal team and GOP allies lost nearly every lawsuit they filed contesting the results in battleground states that Joe Biden won.
Trump’s last-ditch effort to steal the election came on January 6, 2021, the day Congress was set to certify Biden’s win. At a “Save America” rally shortly before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, Trump urged thousands of his frenzied supporters to “fight like hell,” adding, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
At least five people died as a result of the Capitol siege, and Trump is now at the center of multiple escalating federal and state criminal investigations into the riot. The former president recently alluded to the possibility of political violence if he’s indicted, saying, “I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which, perhaps, we’ve never seen before.”
The former president, who now heads the smaller but Twitter-like site Truth Social, has celebrated Musk’s takeover.
“I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social the day after Musk’s Twitter purchase was finalized. “Twitter must now work hard to rid itself of all of the bots and fake accounts that have hurt it so badly. It will be much smaller, but better.”
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