In a recent piece at the New Republic, Pam Segall reminds us how, in January 2021, Twitter permanently suspended Trump from “his favorite social platform” (Twitter), where he regularly spewed lies and, worse, because of “the risk of further incitement of violence” in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.
”Twitter not only revoked Trump’s ability to share 280-character missives” Segall adds, but also “removed all of his previous messages.”
Piling on some well-deserved humiliation to Trump’s ego, around the same time “Trump also lost access to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Twitch, with some of those also deleting his history of messages.”
While the disappearance of Trump’s more than 26,000 dishonest, degrading, invectives-laden, error-riddled tweets is no loss to the literary world, it could leave a gap in the historical record.
A record needed so that the four-year rule of America’s worst president will never be forgotten. A “most malicious legacy” that –already before the January 6 insurrection — the Atlantic’s Peter Wehner described as “a tribalistic, distrustful, and sometimes delusional political culture.”
A record needed in order that America hopefully will never again repeat such a catastrophic mistake nor absolve “the former president of his many troubling statements made before and while in office…tweets [that] were overtly racist, sexist, ableist, nativist, or just outright offensive.”
Segall puts it this way:
But now we live without an official record. Years’ worth of online stories and blog posts are littered with phantom spaces where embedded tweets once lived. And without the primary sources, how will historians judge the Trump years?
As our nation and the Free World face the most serious security threat since World War II, Trump is once again siding with his hero, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as the Russian dictator is threatening to attack independent Ukraine, even calling the actions of Putin “an act of ‘genius.’”
Trump is not alone in praising Putin. His former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo has been calling Putin “talented,” “savvy,” “shrewd” and a “talented statesman” for whom he has “enormous respect.”
And it is not the first time that Trump has praised, revered, the mass-murdering dictator on Twitter and via other media – not even “the 37th time.”
However, when one recalls one such outrage posted on Twitter and tries to confirm it at @realDonaldTrump one encounters the message “This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more.”
Fortunately, others have stepped in to preserve the record. Among them news organizations.
Already in November 2019, CNN published a list of 25 occasions when “Trump was soft on Russia or gave Putin a boost.” Just nine months later, the list was updated bringing the number of times that Trump sided with Putin to 37.
Private outlets such as ProPublica’s “Politwoops,’’ The Wayback Machine and thetrumparchive.com are also stepping in according to Segall.
Others are suggesting that Congress require platforms such as Twitter to maintain “a legally accessible record of their archives, or at least of posts from members of government…and that the National Archives create a mirror copy of all of Trump’s tweets from his presidency… to preserve and protect the historical record.”
Perhaps more effective than any of these recommendations, Trump himself is making sure that his outrages and excesses are never forgotten, through his own renewed “giddy rush to side with a foreign leader who is proving to be an enemy of the United States and the West, [something ] shocking even by Trump’s self-serving standards.”
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.