Donald Trump calls for massive protests over criminal charges
Donald Trump refers to himself as '45th and 47th president'
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The footage comes just 13 months after the former US president was kicked off Twitter for allegedly helping to inflame the January 6 Capitol riots, and ahead of his new social media platform launch.
The site named Truth Social will be an alternative to Twitter and is currently only available to those who receive an exclusive invitation. Anyone can use the site once it goes live on February 21.
Trump was banished from major social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the wake of the US Capitol riot by a pro-Trump mob as the companies feared a risk of further violence.
His accounts were locked after he published a string of inflammatory messages on the day violent protesters stormed the nation’s capital. With a new social media site set to launch in a matter of weeks and recent protest hints at the rally, there are concerns of potential future riots.
Stephen Farnworth, a US political scientist, told Express.co.uk: “Certainly the possibility of other protests against the government are out there but Trump himself encourages protests if he gets charged with crimes like [he did] in his protests the other day in Texas.”
In a video circulating on Twitter, Donald Trump told fans that if the “radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal- I hope we are going to have [in] this country, the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt”, before the cheering Texas crowd.
The US political expert believes the former president plans to use the Truth Social site to “rally more Republican voters” in the run up to the 2024 presidential election.
Mr Farnworth said: “It’s clear Donald Trump wants to set the stage for a 2024 campaign.
“It’s clear above all that Donald Trump craves attention, he wants to be the centre of the conversation and if he can’t be on a place like Twitter then he will find another place where he can do that”.
However, Stephen Farnworth told Express.co.uk: “The big uncertainty about Trump’s political future really has to do not with whether he has a social media presence that expands or not, but rather what happens with the investigations that are now underway about possible illegal action in the run-up to January 6 and in Trump’s businesses.
“It will be out of the voter’s hands. It’s going to be very hard to run for president if facing criminal charges and that will have a dramatic impact on the 2024 elections”.
The forty-fifth president is facing a deluge of legal challenges this year including alleged financial misconduct at his company, his involvement in the January 6 riot, tax-dodging charges among others yet he still plans to run in the next election.
The press release announcing Trump’s new social media platform Truth Social claimed it will be a place that “encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology.” Yet, the site’s terms of service forbid users from using the platform to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the site”, NPR reported.
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It is still not known what impact Truth Social could yet have on potential future pro-Trump protests or the outcome of the 2024 election.
Writer and political analyst Arieh Kovler said “most” users of the site will be Trump supporters and warned, “when you get a bunch of people together who all think the same thing, it starts to look like these radicalising spaces”.
But when asked whether he was concerned the platform would be used as a place to potentially help incite future riots, Nr Kovler told Express.co.uk: “Well maybe, but they are perfectly capable of forming that same bubble on Twitter or other sites”.
“The big question will be how he will treat people who are getting banned from Twitter but don’t necessarily support his politics.
He questioned “what are they going to do when the Nazis arrive? When people with swastika profiles turn up. Are they going to ban them or not? That’s a decision they will have to make on day one. That will tell us a lot about where this thing is going to go”.
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