With Donald Trump’s 2024 ambitions bloodstained by the death of five people during the siege of the Capitol that he encouraged, Twitter finally decided to ban the president’s personal account permanently. While Twitter still allows Iran to publicly plot the eradication of Israel and China to lie about its genocide of the Uigurs on the forum, it claims that it banned Trump for two violations of “Glorification for Violence”: that he tweeted that he wouldn’t attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration and that he called those who voted for him “great American Patriots” after the Capitol catastrophe.
If this reasoning feels fallacious, it’s because Twitter was in search of a rationale in search of a conclusion. But Twitter isn’t banning Trump out of any sort of principle over enabling his rise. Instead, it has made the calculated prediction that Trump cannot contend in a 2024 primary after Wednesday’s disaster, and thus, as an irrelevant private citizen relegated to Mar-a-Lago, he is no longer worth the estimated $2 billion value of the company’s more than $40 billion market cap.
After Election Day, Trump was poised to be the kingmaker of the Republican Party for the next two years at a minimum. The party made historic gains among Latinos, especially with men, and the working class under his tenure in office, and he would be the obvious 2024 front-runner if he ran out of the party’s fear of crossing him alone. But Trump spent the last two months devolving into the very public and very humiliating delusion that actually he won the 2020 election by millions of votes, and by convincing his followers that the general election was rigged, he depressed conservative turnout in the Georgia runoff elections so deeply that Republicans lost their control of the Senate, giving Democrats unified control of the federal government.
Trump still could have dusted himself off after his two-month meltdown and costing Republicans their final check against a party riddled with socialists, but then came Wednesday, when he cheered on the maskless mob he invited to Washington, D.C., during a pandemic and claimed he would march the group to the Capitol as it rallied to “stop the steal.” The mob then climbed, punched, and battered its way into Congress, resulting in the deaths of five people.
Trump, one week ago the de facto presidential front-runner, is now damaged goods. He personally has zero political value, and thanks to his bloody bet, all chatter of his spawn and whomever his spawn is sleeping at the moment running for elected office will never be taken seriously again. Talk of removing Trump from office via impeachment or the 25th Amendment was roundly considered laughable by conservatives across the spectrum just days ago. Today, the White House is bleeding staff, ranging from Trump loyalists like Stephanie Grisham to Cabinet secretaries such as Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos.
Twitter is still a publicly traded company. It has earnings reports to post and investors to report to. Jack Dorsey may be an ascetic weirdo who’s happy to survive traveling through San Francisco’s poop-ridden streets by foot and with five meals a week, but the rest of his staff is not. The reins of control have been held by Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy, and trust for Twitter, for years now. Gadde earned a glossy Politico profile back in October for slowly shutting conservatives out of the site, and hundreds of twenty-somethings who scorn the fact that they turned down slightly better BCG salaries upon graduation look to activists like Gadde to virtue-signal just enough to convince them that they make a difference. Sure, the public forum of ideas and free speech as a guiding principle should be included in the notion of corporate social responsibility, but classical liberalism or even ideological diversity are no longer values of the technocratic class.
In short, Twitter, like every private corporation, has one goal: to maximize its return to its shareholders. For a publicly traded company, that number is quantifiable. The cost of keeping Trump on the platform from “resistance” unfollows was negligible while journalists remained glued to their phones over whatever feud the president was starting next and professional reply guys relied on Trump’s comment sections to prove how woke they were. But an ex-president allowed to continue his conspiracy theorizing even after it rendered him barred from public life? Nope, that’s a cost too far, practically speaking.
Twitter banning Trump is a matter of dollars and cents. Trump had a high value and a low cost. With the formula reversed, Twitter sees no reason to keep damaged goods dragging it down.
