With over 15 million Twitter accounts voting, the verdict is in: 51.8% of those who took the 24-hour poll posted by Twitter owner Elon Musk said former President Donald Trump should be reinstated in that social media universe.
Musk ordered it so, saying, “The people have spoken.”
Over 134 million Twitter account owners saw the poll, with 15,085,458 taking part in voting either “yes” or “no” to the statement: “Reinstate former President Trump,” according to Musk.
Trump’s last comment on Twitter before the former CEO banned him for life was on Jan. 8, 2021: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” He was banned for glorifying violence in a pair of tweets:
Trump on Feb. 22, 2021 launched his own social media company, TruthSocial, which is populated by Trump-supporting conservatives and others. He remarked on Friday that he encouraged people to vote yes on the Twitter poll, but would continue to run the TruthSocial site.
“Vote now with positivity, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere. Truth Social is special,” he wrote on TruthSocial. TruthSocial had about 1.9 unique users in September of 2022.
On Saturday, in an address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump said, “I don’t see any reason for it,” responding to the question of whether he would return to Twitter, where he has an audience that reached 90 million people directly or through retweets.
Trump this week announced he will run for president in 2024. Three days later, the Biden Administration’s Attorney General appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump and his involvement in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when protesters entered the U.S. Capitol and were unruly and posed a danger to lawmakers, as they tried to disrupt the finalization of the 2020 election that brought Joe Biden into the White House. That investigation is destined to hound Trump throughout the campaign and could widen to other scandals.
Musk and Trump have had a rocky relationship, mainly because the former president can be thin-skinned and Musk doesn’t care what Trump thinks. In July, Musk wrote that Trump should “sail away into the sunset.”
Musk also said, “I feel a bit stronger that he is not the right guy. He doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.”
Trump, in turn, has called Musk a “bullshit artist.”
Early in Trump’s presidency, he appointed Musk to two economic advisory councils. Then, after Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, Musk resigned from them.
“Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” Musk said in a tweet on June 1, 2017.
