Dem
50
Ties
1
GOP
49
Elon Musk sent out a tweet on Friday asking if Donald Trump should be allowed back on Twitter. On Saturday he announced that the people have spoken and Trump is now reinstated. Interesting way of learning what "the people" want. The vote was 51.8% for reinstatement and 49.2% against. Maybe Musk needs to read a biography of George Gallup, since his approach hardly produced a random selection of Twitter users (or Americans, or people in general). Further, if you are thinking this is exactly the kind of thing that would cause Russia's GRU to get involved, you're not the only one. Of course, Musk had already effectively announced the result weeks ago, just after he bought Twitter and long before his "poll."
Now the big question is whether Trump will come back. If he does, that will spell the end of Truth Social and all the grift associated with it. Killing off Truth Social will leave all the investors who put money into it holding the bag, something Trump has done many times in the past. He could care less about them. The only thing that might keep him over there for a while is if he has a binding contract to stay there with a penalty clause if he leaves.
If Trump comes back to Twitter, it will become even more of an unmanageable cesspool than it already is. Really nasty battles will break out between pro- and anti-Trump tweeters. Musk may or may not want to try to moderate that, or at least remove some of most vitriolic and obscene content, but with a skeleton staff due to his firing half the company and a large segment of the remainder quitting, he won't be able to do enforce any new rules. It could get quite messy. But so far Trump has not indicated that he wants to come back. In the end, we suspect that his love of attention will bring him back in the fullness of time because he loves attention even more than he loves money, with Ivanka in third place.
The replatforming of Trump did not go unnoticed. On Saturday, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said: "Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all." Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) called Musk's move "a terrible mistake."
What will be worth watching is how other social media sites react to Musk's decision. Facebook has said that in January it will consider the issue of allowing Trump back. Google has said that Trump is not welcome on YouTube until the risk of violence he poses has subsided. (V)