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- Twitter banned Donald Trump in 2021. Elon Musk reinstated him in 2022. But he's only posted once since then.
- Trump is now running a Twitter ad that looks like it comes from his account.
- Of note: Musk is scheduled to conduct an interview with Trump on Twitter/X tonight.
Welcome back to Twitter, Donald Trump.
Sort-of welcome back, I guess: The former president — who was barred from Twitter in 2021, then reinstated by new Twitter owner Elon Musk in 2022, and who has tweeted just once since then — has posted from his account again.
But this time he's paying to do it.
Or, more accurately: Trump's campaign seems to be using Trump's account to post an ad on the service, which Musk has renamed "X." This was posted early Monday morning and has more than 14 million views at the time I'm typing this:
Are you better off now than you were when I was president?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2024
Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We're a nation in decline.
Make the American Dream AFFORDABLE again. Make America SAFE again. Make America GREAT Again! #TrumpOnX
This is the first time I've seen a post from Trump's account on Twitter since July 2023, when he posted his mugshot. Prior to and since that, he's confined his trademark rants to Truth Social, the Twitter clone he launched in February 2022. (After we published this story, Trump's account tweeted again: this time, posting a campaign-style video that wasn't labeled as an ad).
When Truth Social first launched, Trump agreed not to post on any other social media platform for at least six hours after posting on his own service.
It's unclear whether that agreement has changed. I've asked Twitter and Trump's campaign for comment.
What I can say is that even though the posts look like Donald Trump posts, they also look nothing like a "real" Donald Trump post — the seat-of-the-pants, sometimes random, often hard-to-parse, and frequently inflammatory stuff he used to do on Twitter all the time. And the stuff he's still doing on Truth Social now — like on Sunday, when he accused Kamala Harris' campaign of somehow "faking" crowds at her events using AI.
The first Twitter posts, in contrast, seem like the kind of Trump his campaign wishes existed. Closer to the stuff the campaign posts on Twitter on its own.
The timing for this seems to be pretty specific: Trump is scheduled to appear on the platform Monday night at 8 p.m. Eastern for an interview with Musk — who has endorsed Trump and is donating to a pro-Trump political action committee.