BREAKING NEWS: Trump Has Found a Way to Circumvent His Twitter Ban—and Twitter Has Done Nothing About It
A few weeks ago, Trump initiated a craven scheme that effectively undid his Twitter ban. But most Americans don't yet realize that the domestic terror leader again has access to millions via Twitter.
Introduction
On June 18, CNN reported that Donald Trump had hired former Republican National Committee spokeswoman Liz Harrington to replace Jason Miller as his spokesperson. Miller had, at the time of his departure, been tasked by Trump with finding the former president a new digital platform from which to wage his continued insurgency against the American government and all Americans. But as it turns out, the resulting—rather sad—concoction by Miller, the haplessly named (and obvious Twitter clone) GETTR, wasn’t Trump’s planned vehicle for returning to social media. Indeed, it was actually Miller’s replacement, Harrington, who Trump chose to be the vessel for his seditious rhetoric, and it was Twitter itself to which Trump aimed to make a triumphant return.
{Note: Trump was banned from Twitter on January 8, 2021. As one of the leading advocates for his removal from Twitter—beginning in 2017, when the then-president began committing actual federal crimes via his Twitter feed—I was interviewed by the Washington Post about Trump’s permanent ban from the platform. You can read about my comments to the Post in this essay, and can read the Post article itself here. The Twitter “ban evasion” policy that Trump is now violating is here.}
On January 7, the day after the January 6 launch of Trump’s insurrection, Harrington, despite her longtime public role as the voice of the Republican Party, had just 191,000 followers on Twitter. Over the ensuing 100 days, Harrington lost an astonishing 43,000 followers—a collapse of interest in her public communications that took almost 23% of the audience she’d been building on Twitter for nearly a decade (since August of 2012). Yet Harrington has now gained back 26,000 followers in just the last twelve weeks, and appears poised to surpass the January 2021 heyday of her social media following. Even WayBackMachine, which had stopped crawling Harrington’s Twitter feed to archive it after she left the RNC, is now again regularly cataloging her tweets. Why? Because she is Donald Trump’s new Twitter account, and people are starting to notice. Indeed, it would be correct to say that Harrington’s feed is now Trump’s “sock-puppet account.”
Nor is it a coincidence that Trump hired Harrington to reactivate his Twitter account via the back door, as he did so just as (a) he returned to his modus operandi of holding super-spreader political rallies at which he bangs on about nothing for ninety minutes, and (b) his golfing partner Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) acquired information about Trump’s political plans such that, based on what he’d heard from Trump over the last month, he recently said he’ll be “shocked” if Trump doesn’t run for president in 2024.
What Liz Harrington Is Doing
Not long after Harrington’s hire, Trump began issuing several-times-a-day “statements” that are, in fact, simply tweets that would break Twitter’s 280-character limit as well as its ban on Trump posting messages via the platform.
Trump’s tweets-cum-statements are immediately tweeted out by Liz Harrington to her rapidly (re-)growing follower base. A comprehensive review of the last week of tweets from Harrington (at an account, @realLizUSA, whose name offers an echo of Trump’s former Twitter handle, @realDonaldTrump) reveals the following (emphasis supplied):
On July 18, Harrington tweeted two Trump tweets, excerpting both so that they would appear both as an image and as a tweet (see below an example).
On July 17, Harrington tweeted two Trump tweets with both image and excerpt. Because Trump’s tweets-cum-statements were so long, Harrington’s excerpting of Trump’s words actually crossed over a handful of tweets rather than only two.
On July 16, Harrington tweeted six Trump tweets with both image and excerpt. Because Trump’s tweets-cum-statements were so long, Harrington’s excerpting of Trump’s words actually crossed over more than a dozen tweets rather than six.
On July 15, Harrington tweeted ten Trump tweets with both image and excerpt. Because Trump’s tweets-cum-statements were so long, Harrington’s excerpting of Trump’s words required more than two dozen tweets rather than merely ten.
On July 14, Harrington tweeted six Trump tweets with both image and excerpt. Because Trump’s tweets-cum-statements were so long, Harrington’s excerpting of Trump’s words actually crossed over ten tweets rather than just the six.
On July 13, Harrington tweeted four Trump tweets with both image and excerpt. Because Trump’s tweets-cum-statements were so long, Harrington’s excerpting of Trump’s words actually crossed over more than a dozen tweets rather than six.
On July 12, Harrington tweeted seven Trump tweets with image and excerpt. But because Trump’s tweets-cum-statements were so long, Harrington’s excerpting of her boss’s words actually crossed over more than a dozen tweets, rather than six.
On July 12, Harrington tweeted out seven minutes of Trump speaking over ten tweets.
In all, the last seven days saw Harrington post an astounding 37 Donald Trump tweet-statements over approximately 80 tweets, as well as at least seven minutes of audio of Trump speaking.
Harrington’s Consciousness of Guilt
To hide that she’s now simply Trump’s Twitter amanuensis, Trump’s spokeswoman also posts other Terms of Service-violative content, usually relating to Trump’s “Big Lie.” She also retweets insurrectionist lieutenants and captains, for instance, among others, ex-con insurrectionist Bernard Kerik; a Trump co-conspirator in the Trump-Ukraine scandal (for which Trump was impeached), fake “journalist” John Solomon; insurrectionist Congresswoman Lauren Boebert and insurrectionist Congressman Jody Hice, the latter of whom was at the White House’s pre-January 6 strategy session on December 21, 2020; Trump campaign official Katrina Pierson, who coordinated the events of January 6 on Trump’s behalf; Oath Keeper and insurrectionist leader Wendy Rogers, a Stop the Steal kingpin one of the two two elected officials in Arizona most closely linked to the criminally fraudulent Arizona “audit”; far-right trolls Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson, who routinely spread COVID-19 disinformation as well as white supremacist rhetoric; Christina Bobb, the Trump administration Department of Homeland Security staffer who was in Trump’s “war room” at the Willard Hotel on January 6, as exclusively reported by Proof; and former Trump White House official Stephen Miller.
Here’s an example of Harrington’s sock-puppetry (a transparent ploy that was repeated more than three dozen times in just the last week of her employment as Trump’s agent):
There’s a legitimate question to be asked about whether, after one has been banned from Twitter, one can simply—if one is rich enough—hire a personal assistant to continue tweeting for you. This certainly makes a Twitter ban irrelevant by way of entirely circumventing its purpose. As to whether the banning of a former elected official should also result in the automatic banning of their spokesperson, that’s a separate question; assuming the said spokesperson uses their Twitter account in their personal capacity, it would likely be inappropriate to ban them when or if they haven’t violated Twitter’s terms of service. A third scenario is a banned person’s spokesperson only tweeting “on behalf of” the banned individual on very rare occasion—that is, only when an event has occurred that the banned individual in question might naturally be expected issue a public statement on, regardless of any social media ban. For instance, Trump might feel compelled to issue a statement when his family company is indicted for criminal activity in New York, or whenever he faces yet another allegation (it would be his thirtieth or more) of having raped or otherwise sexually assaulted a woman.
Of these three possibilities, Trump and Harrington’s scam is clearly in the first bucket.
The volume and consistency of Harrington’s parroting of Trump’s words—unedited by Harrington, unresponsive to any particular event that demands an immediate public response from Trump, and unrelated to Harrington simply writing in the first person about her own life and duties—confirms that when he decided to relaunch his political career with an eye toward the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump determined that, instead of using a new social media platform to spread his message, he would just use the very same one he’d just been banned from not six months earlier. And why not? So far Twitter has done nothing to stop him.
Indeed, Proof is quite early to this story, apparently, as Twitter has—it seems—taken no steps to even acknowledge what Trump is now doing, let alone to suspend or ban Harrington’s Twitter feed. Proof has found no evidence yet that Twitter has warned Harrington about her conduct. While this may be because Harrington at present has “only” 180,000 or so followers, of course the more important data here is Harrington’s “engagement” data, which suggests she’s getting thousands of retweets daily for her sock-puppet Trump tweets. By way of example, just one July 16 thread “by” Harrington that was in actuality entirely comprised of the former president trying to evade his Twitter ban received about 4,000 retweets across its six constituent tweets.
As it becomes more widely known that one can read Trump’s words on Twitter simply by following his new spokeswoman’s still-active Twitter account, it’s certain that the domestic terror leader’s reach on the platform will again hit a significant level—almost certainly one Twitter can’t ignore.
Conclusion
It goes without saying that, as a legal matter, Harrington is Trump’s “agent”—and is now tweeting, knowingly, as his agent. The majority of Harrington’s tweets, therefore, are not technically retweets of Trump (which they wouldn’t be, anyway, given that she always types a key excerpt into Twitter as “original” Twitter content, having no source account that she can quote-tweet) but must be seen, legally, as statements by Trump.
Legal terminology aside, it’s also worth considering something else—something more nefarious—about Trump’s ban-evasion plot.
While Jason Miller’s GETTR may have launched in early July—mostly to a cavalcade of hentai porn and BTS memes that Miller’s team struggled to quickly get a handle on—Miller had been working on the website for many weeks, if not months, beforehand. GETTR was devised as not just a Twitter clone but a Twitter competitor, meaning that Trump had every reason to know that his then-spokesman would soon be in a position in which it’d be impossible for him to post on Twitter regularly. What would it say about GETTR if the platform’s founder was regularly posting on GETTR’s competitor?
You may see where I’m heading with this. Miller had to depart as Trump’s spokesman, in at least some significant part, because he was not going to be able to do for Trump what Trump had evidently decided to do by mid-June—that is, to not use a new digital platform like GETTR but instead find an agent to circumvent his existing Twitter ban.
It’s clear that that’s now what Trump has done.
As Trump’s plot is only a couple weeks old, it hasn’t yet been caught by major media. It will therefore be easy for some observers to say, “What’s the big deal? He has nothing like the same platform via Harrington that he had under his own name!” But this view mistakes (a) the fact that Trump-Harrington’s audience will grow by leaps and bounds in the second and subsequent months of the ban-evasion plot, and (b) that it’ll become harder and harder for Twitter to suddenly shut down Harrington’s feed when, as, or if they allowed it to fester for months. It’s critical, therefore, that Twitter take action now to treat Trump as it would any other Twitter user who was permanently banned from the platform and thereafter got a sock-puppet account to evade their banishment. That Trump is (while nothing like a billionaire) rich enough to hire an executive assistant to be his public sock-puppet should not be relevant to Twitter’s enforcement of its Terms of Service; rich people aren’t supposed to be given special dispensation by Twitter to violate the terms of a platform ban. But at the moment, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Anyone who checks out Harrington’s Twitter account will almost immediately see that she and Trump are basically daring Twitter to ban her. In the view of this publication, which has since its founding decried both the public and private coddling of Trump by our leading corporate and governmental institutions, Twitter should rise to this new challenge and suspend Harrington from Twitter until she ceases to use her feed as a Terms of Service-violative sock-puppet account. She has every right to take dirty cash from a domestic terror leader to shill for his ersatz “movement,” but she doesn’t have the right to a Twitter feed if she’s going to systematically abuse the platform’s Terms.
{Note: There are other accounts, such as this one, that have over 100,000 followers and have obviously built up their following in part by tweeting out images of Trump’s daily “statements.” These accounts are more difficult for Twitter to police, because they are anonymous, are not clearly tied to Trump, and cannot be seen as a direct consequence of Trump’s own actions. This said, if Twitter takes action against a sock-puppet account being run by someone who is in Trump’s employ, it will send the message that other accounts that systematically spread banned content may be subject to tweet removals and/or temporary suspension at a minimum.}
So could we all report Harrington’s account as pretending to be someone else (DJT)? I know that’s not exactly correct, but at least it calls attention to what is going on since there’s not a “sock puppet” option. 🤷🏻♀️
I flagged it as fake.