Donald Trump has made his return to the platform formerly known as Twitter.
On Thursday, the former president turned himself at the Fulton County jail on over a dozen charges related to his efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. Over the last five months, Trump has faced criminal charges in four separate cases, but the most recent booking was the first and only time his mugshot was taken.
Trump was permanently banned from the platform on January 8th, 2021, with the company citing a “risk of further incitement of violence” after his supporters stormed the US capitol.
Since then, Trump has started his own social media platform, Truth Social, and Twitter has rebranded after Elon Musk purchased the company, stating that he plans to turn it into an “everything app” called X. Trump has also announced that he’ll be running for president in 2024. Trump first posted the image of his mugshot on Truth Social earlier Thursday evening.
On November 18th, 2022, Musk ran a poll asking Twitter users if he should reinstate Trump, and the next day, he declared that he would do so based on the poll’s results. (There were around 15 million responses, with 51.8 percent saying yes and 48.2 percent saying no.) Trump’s account was unsuspended alongside the announcement, though the former president implied there was no need for him to come back to Twitter because of how well Truth Social was doing and because he sees “a lot of problems on Twitter,” according to Bloomberg. He did, however, tell his supporters to vote yes in the poll.
Before reinstating Trump’s account last year, Musk also brought back the accounts belonging to the conservative parody outlet The Babylon Bee, comedian Kathy Griffin, and author Jordan Peterson.
