Former US President Donald Trump tossed a jab at Twitter in an interview with Newsmax on Wednesday, addressing his permanent ban from the social network by arguing that it was nowhere near as exciting now that he was no longer on it.
“I’ll tell you it’s not the same,” Trump said to host Greg Kelly. “If you look at what’s going on with Twitter, I understand it’s become very boring and millions of people are leaving. They’re leaving it because it’s not the same and I can understand that … It’s become very boring; we don’t want to go back to Twitter”.
The former president called the fact-check flaggings he had received on Twitter for promoting election fraud conspiracy theories “disgraceful,” and briefly addressed rumors that he might leverage accounts on other social networks, stating that “they wanted me very much on Parler”.
He shied away from any definite statements, however, and instead stressed his high number of Twitter followers right before he was permanently banned on Jan. 8 for rhetoric that had contributed to the U.S. Capitol insurrection two days prior.
“You know, I had 89 million [followers on Twitter] … and then on top of that I had 36 million or 39 million on @POTUS, and we had other sites where we had millions and millions of people, so we have … about as big as it gets, and likewise on Facebook,” Trump said, referencing the fact that Facebook had also indefinitely banned him. “They all want that and part of the problem is, mechanically, they can’t handle it, because it’s too many people. It’s bigger than they are by many times”.
Trump added that he was toying with the idea of creating a unique platform for his fanbase: “There is also the other option of building your own site. Because we have more people than anybody. You can literally build your own site”.
Other topics touched upon in the interview included Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump praised as “unique” and a “hard one to replace,” as well as a potential presidential bid in 2024.
“I won’t say yet, but we have tremendous support,” Trump said. “I’m looking at poll numbers that are through the roof … Let’s say someone gets impeached, typically your numbers would go down … like a dead balloon. But the numbers are good, very high”.
The 45th president also reiterated his baseless allegations of election fraud, claiming that “bad, dishonest things happened,” and offered no praise for current President Joe Biden, though he did add that he was attempting to avoid speaking out during the beginning of Biden’s tenure in the White House.
“It hasn’t been that quiet, frankly, but I wanted to be somewhat quiet”, Trump said.