Trump bragged to friends about getting millions to launch social media platform for conservative fans: Report
Former president Donald Trump has reportedly claimed to his friends that he has hundreds of millions of dollars in backing to set up a new social media venture. This comes after he was permanently banned from Twitter following an insurrection allegedly incited by him. This venture would reportedly give him an online presence and at the same time protect conservative voices on the internet from getting shut down by the big tech companies.
According to a Washington Examiner report, among the financiers of the ex-POTUS' plan are Silicon Valley figures who are motivated by fears of censorship and online “cancel culture”. It seems that Trump was waiting for an acquittal by the Senate after his second impeachment trial before starting to appear for television interviews from Mar-a-Lago, his current private residence in Palm Beach, Florida. Last week, he appeared on Newsmax for an interview, where he said that his fanbase, which includes millions, might soon have a platform to catch up with him as he was thinking of buying a social media company.
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“We’re negotiating with a number of people,” he told Newsmax TV. “There is also the option of building your own site because we have more people than anybody, so you can literally build your own site. But we were being really harassed on Twitter. They were putting up all sorts of flags, I guess they call them, they were flagging almost anything you said.”
Sources familiar with discussions on the subject also told the outlet that Trump had also met with potential investors to develop a new online venture designed to allow the former president to engage with his supporters. The argument being made by the Trump team to rally libertarian donors is the freedom of speech, one Republican said. “They aren’t the people you might expect,” he said.
Chairman of the American Conservative Union Matt Schlapp said that censorship by big tech companies such as Twitter and Facebook will not be able to keep Trump out of politics. “There’s a real despondent feeling among those people,” he said. “And many were buoyed to hear the former president. We never had a president get silenced before. It’s never happened.”
We earlier reported that Gab, which has quickly become the new hangout spot for conservative Americans, recreated Trump's entire list of tweets. The platform's popularity sky-rocketed after the company's CEO Andrew Torba backed up Trump’s Twitter account before it was deleted and restored the same on his company's medium.
Soon after that, rumors started floating that the former president was secretly using the account set up in Torba's name on Gab to post messages after being banned from other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Torba took to his own platform on February 7 to write a blistering rebuke of the rumor and also explained who was behind it. The CEO also revealed why he thinks Trump has remained off social media since he left the White House.
"@realdonaldtrump is and always has been a mirror archive of POTUS’ tweets and statements that we’ve run for years. We’ve always been transparent about this and would obviously let people know if the President starts using it. The only reason he’s not using it right now to contact his base is because dopey advisers like Jared Kushner, who lost him the election, are blocking him from using it," he wrote in a message on Gab. He added: "A fake news story was started by random British newspapers that didn’t even bother calling us to fact check or for comment. We will be writing a blog post to expose this fake news shortly. We will go on the record stating that we know 100% for a fact that Jared Kushner is actively trying to keep Trump off Gab and has been for weeks. Because Gab is the only safe place left for conservatives that means Kushner is trying to keep Trump off the Internet."