Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Elon Musk reinstated former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Saturday.
Though the @realDonaldTrump account is active again, several tweets from January 6 are gone.
A tweet attacking Mike Pence’s courage and another about the riot appear to have been removed.
After Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Saturday some of the former president’s tweets from the day of the Capitol riot appeared to have been removed.
A transcript of Trump’s tweets on January 6, 2021, compiled by the University of California Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, suggested several posts were missing after the @realDonaldTrump account was reactivated.
“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!”
Also missing was a post Trump made after 6 p.m. the same day, saying: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
It was not immediately clear why the tweets were missing or when they were removed. Representatives for Twitter and Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
Other posts from the former president that day appear to be unaltered, though many of his tweets containing claims about election fraud include a warning that the information is disputed.
Trump’s follower count was also fluctuating wildly after being reinstated. Ryan Mac, a tech reporter from The New York Times, said in a tweet it may take time to restore the back-end profile connections, adding “the same thing happened in 2017 when a Twitter contractor went rogue and deactivated Trump’s profile.“
Trump was banned from Twitter on January 8, 2021, following the siege on the US Capitol. “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.
Though the billionaire owner of Twitter has previously spoken about his belief that the decision to ban Trump was “morally wrong and flat out stupid,” Musk posed the question of Trump’s reinstatement to his followers in a Friday poll. As of Saturday evening, the poll showed 51.8% of respondents voted “Yes” while 48.2% voted “No.”
“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.”