Donald Trump’s account is dead, kaput, slain, slaughtered, drawn and quartered, left out to rot and never coming back, according to Twitter.
Twitter addicts are willing to do some frankly disturbing things to get back their accounts after a ban, including switching to alt accounts that also end up banned, launching doomed lawsuits, and chaining themselves to the company’s headquarters. One particularly notorious provocateur even ran for office, apparently in the hopes that being elected would somehow trap the company in a “gotcha” scenario where they would become retroactively eligible for the special treatment Twitter affords to public figures. None of those zany schemes usually pay off, and it would seem they’ll be just as much of a waste of time if Trump attempts them.
During an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal clarified that the company will never allow @realDonaldTrump to return, even in the dystopian scenario where Trump somehow manages to facehug the nation again in 2024 and inject himself into another term in office.
“Former President Trump was banned,” Squawk Box host Becky Quick asked Segal. “If he came back, ran for office again, and was elected president, would you allow him back on the platform?”
Segal responded that, “the way our policies work, when you’re removed from the platform, you’re removed from the platform, whether you’re a commentator, you’re a CFO, or you are a former or current public official.”
“The way our policies work, when you’re removed from the platform, you’re removed from the platform whether you’re a commentator, you’re a CFO or you are a former or current public official,” says $TWTR CFO @nedsegal on if President Trump’s account could be restored. pic.twitter.com/ZZxascb9Rz
— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) February 10, 2021
“Remember, our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence, and if anybody does that, we have to remove them from the service and our policies don’t allow people to come back,” he added.
Segal added that Trump’s ban on Jan. 8 — for inciting riots at the Capitol that killed at least five people and nearly sparked a constitutional crisis — did not actually harm the company in any measurable way, as outraged conservatives warned it would.
“We added 40 million people to our DAU [daily active user count] last year, and 5 million last quarter,” Segal said. “In January, we added more DAU than the average of the last four Januarys, so hopefully that gives people a sense for the momentum we’ve got from all the hard work we’ve done on the service.”
Trump is now facing trial in the Senate after the House voted to impeach him for a second time over the Capitol riots. While he can no longer be removed from office — as voters already did that — a conviction in the Senate could bar him from holding any federal office in the future . Republicans in the Senate currently appear poised to let Trump off the hook a second time.
But as far as Trump’s infamous account is concerned, it’s over. Totally over. Just so long as some mischievous sex-having teens don’t recite his name three times in front of a dark mirror, a dog doesn’t dig up the ex-president’s cursed iPhone, Jack Dorsey and the entire Twitter moderation team don’t all view a hexed Pepe at once, or some hedge fund guys from the 80s don’t take over Twitter and think reinstating @realDonaldTrump could juice short-term returns. Yep. Over.