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Notes -
Bizarrely pro-Trump? The tweet was this:
Were there 75,000,000 rioters? Did Trump actually say in this very tweet he was referring to people who voted for him?
What this release amounts to is many people inside Twitter were looking for a reason, any reason, to ban Trump, and despite some initial resistance by some more process-oriented people, he was indeed banned.
The staffer in question said the following according to Weiss.
"voted for him" and "terrorists" (referring to the Jan 6th rioters) are not mutually exclusive. I'd expect that sort of interpretation from a Trump supporter looking to deny, deny, deny. When I ask myself who was there, I don't think the answer is ever going to be "people who aren't Trump supporters but decided to riot inside".
We have no idea how many people wanted him banned that way. This is why I said not having the full logs to comb through makes this frustrating - we literally cannot assess accurately how many people wanted Trump gone. We can only speculate about it based on things like political donations, and we have no reason to assume the process-oriented people weren't also left-leaning or anti-Trump. The phrase "vocal minority" exists for a reason.
I'm certain that some of the people rioting at the Capitol were part of the "75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me."
I'm not at all certain that this tweet was some dog whistle meant to praise those specific people. Trump's not known for subtlety. He'd already made a video telling the rioters he loves them.
If this is your standard, then a politician will never be able to praise their voters if some of those voters includes people who participated in a political riot. Given the summer of 2020 and the Capitol riots, that's practically everyone.
All of the Twitter Files stories have highlighted the little dissent they found. I can't see an incentive for misrepresenting that. What would change if instead of one person dissenting it was 10% of the company?
My standard is not that you can't praise your voters, only that we shouldn't pretend your voters may include the anti-social and criminal. I would agree that those people by and large don't define any particular voter base.
How would you change the tweet without spoiling its positive message?
I don't think it should be changed. I think it's clear he's talking about his voters overall, not a specific sub-group. But I wouldn't say that his tweet doesn't include those people.
But then it wasn’t bizarre. The whole point was people arguing that tweet was secretly trying to encourage more rioters when you are effectively saying no — that isn’t a reasonable interpretation.
The interpretation of by that employee was bizarre in that it tried to separate the rioters from Trump supporters. All I'm saying is that this isn't very reasonable - you probably don't have many non-Trump supporters rioting inside the building. This can be true even if we say that the modal supporter isn't a rioter.
Once again context matters. If I said it’s wrong to conflate Trump Voters with J6 rioters, I’d be right in certain contexts and wrong in other contexts. If we were trying to describe who J6 rioters were calling them Trump voters is probably fair. If instead we were trying to describe who Trump voters in fact are then describing them as J6 rioters is unfair.
The context here is that Trump tweeted that his voters weee patriots and should be treated fairly. Twitter people claimed that was incitement (citing dog whistle). That is, that he was really talking about J6 people; not his normal voters.
The response was “that’s bullshit — normal voters and J6 people are different and the tweet plainly is talking about normal voters.”
You seem to be focusing on the literal logical framework of the text instead of reading it in context.
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