Some of Donald Trump’s tweets from the day of the Capitol riot appeared to have been deleted after Elon Musk restored Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Saturday including a tweet in which he attacked his then-vice president Mike Pence.
The @realDonaldTrump account was revived on January 6, 2021, according to a transcript of Trump’s tweets from that day, provided by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. on January 6, in the midst of the riot where his supporters had violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent the certification of the election. “USA demands the truth!”
The same day, after 6 p.m., Trump posted something that was also absent: “When great Americans who have been mistreated and unfairly treated for so long have a sacred landslide election victory violently and unceremoniously taken away, these things and events take place. Go in peace and affection to your house. Remember this day forever!”
The absence of the tweets and their removal date was not immediately apparent, nor was their cause.
While many of the former president’s tweets that day that made accusations about electoral fraud included a disclaimer indicating the material was contested, other Tweets from that day appear to remain unchanged.
After being reinstated, Trump’s supporter count had dramatically shifted numbers. It might take some time to reactivate the back-end profile connections, The New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac wrote in a tweet, adding that the same thing happened in 2017 when a Twitter contractor went rogue and deactivated Trump’s profile.”
On January 8, 2021, Trump was blocked from Twitter as a result of the US Capitol siege. The business tweeted to announce the ban: “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,” the company said in a tweet announcing the ban.
Musk, the billionaire founder of Twitter, asked his followers on Friday whether they thought Trump should be reinstated, despite the fact that he has previously stated that he thought the decision to ban him was “morally wrong and flat-out foolish.” As of Saturday night, the poll revealed that 48.2% of respondents had voted “No” and 51.8% had voted “Yes.”
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk wrote in a Saturday tweet, using a Latin phrase that translates to “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
