A theory
I’ve been wondering about this too. It’s rather bizarre. He’s in the midst of what is already a tough primary fight and his twitter game was instrumental in his 2016 campaign. But despite Elon Musk’s entreaties to return he’s not back on the platform for some reason where he still has a massive following.It just seems unlikely that he’s content with Truth Social where his engagement is tiny by comparison.
Today in the Bulwark, Kimberley Whele discusses that SEC investigation I mentioned the other day in which Trump may be implicated in a money laundering crime to do with his Trump Media company. In the process she notes that this may be the reason he’s not returning to twitter:
Donald Trump is involved in yet another probe that could potentially result in criminal charges against him or his associates, this one a yearslong federal investigation by the SEC and DOJ relating to the creation and funding of his Truth Social platform.
A final twist in the criminal probe involving Trump Media involves the former president’s use of social media. He was banned from Facebook and Instagram following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, but Meta (which owns those platforms) announced in January that he would be reinstated, and on Friday of last week, he resumed posting on Facebook.
Yet he has not yet returned to what was once his favorite mode of communicating with the public—tweeting—even though Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account last November. Trump’s Truth Social platform has, again, a total of 2 million monthly users; his dormant Twitter account is vastly larger, with 87.4 million followers as of today. So why has he stayed away from Twitter?
The reasons no doubt include the stalled merger. If Trump gets back on Twitter, he will devalue his own platform and disappoint investors. Shareholders could then sue him. Columbia University law professor Eric Talley told Semafor: “If it’s going to look, later on, that he never had that intention” of staying off Twitter “but he just wanted to convince people that they should go ahead and close [the SPAC deal] that’s kind of a textbook securities fraud lawsuit.”
That makes perfect sense. He’s pulled a shady deal to get this silly platform going and now he’s stuck. How very Trumpy.