Despite War on Twitter, Trump Says He Won’t Delete Account
Despite his war against Twitter, President Donald Trump said Thursday he has no plans to delete his account.
“Mr. President, given your concern with Twitter, have you given any consideration to deleting your account and just walking away from this platform you’ve been so critical of?” asked a reporter before the president signed an executive order cracking down on social media companies.
That question prompted Trump to reply, “If you weren’t fake, I would not even think about it, I would do that in a heartbeat.”
“But the news is fake. If you look at what gets printed in the papers, if only the public could understand. They are reading a story and they think it’s real and it’s not real in so many cases,” he continued. “I’m not saying every case, you have some great journalists, you have some journalists I have great respect for, but largely I find at least in a political sense there’s so much fake news it’s disgraceful.”
Trump went on, “I would do that in a heartbeat. If we had a fair press in this country, I would do that in a heartbeat. There is nothing I would rather do than get rid of my whole Twitter account, but I’m able to get to I guess 186 million people. When you add up all the different accounts and add Facebook and Instagram, that’s a lot of people, and that’s more than the media companies have, frankly, by a lot.”
“So if I get a story that’s wrong, I can put a social media — I don’t usually use the word Twitter, I say social media — but I put something out and the next day or the next hour or the next minute, everybody is reading about it,” he concluded.
President Trump signed his social media executive order on Thursday after Twitter displayed a fact check on one of his tweets.
“Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post,” the president declared on Tuesday. “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany also railed against Twitter during a press briefing, before claiming the president would “take action to ensure that Big Tech does not stifle free speech and that the rights of all Americans to speak, tweet, and post are protected.”
