‘NEVER SURRENDER’
Former President Donald Trump is back on Twitter—now rebranded as X—posting a bold, defiant message after more than two years of inactivity on the platform.
The post on X at 9:39 p.m. ET shows President Trump in a booking photo at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, taken Thursday after he presented himself to authorities around 7:36 p.m. local time and underwent a 20-minute booking process, after which he was released.
The accompanying text to the social media post includes “MUG SHOT — AUGUST 24, 2023,” “ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” “NEVER SURRENDER!” and “DONALDJTRUMP.COM.”
The post received 200,100 likes and 7.1 million views after just 24 minutes. As of the time of this report, President Trump has 86.5 million followers on the Twitter/X platform.
https://t.co/MlIKklPSJT pic.twitter.com/Mcbf2xozsY
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2023
Online records from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office showed President Trump was booked on 13 charges.
This comes after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Aug. 14 indicted him and 18 of his associates on various felony charges related to allegations that a strategy by several lawyers counseling President Trump to set up alternate groups of electors in multiple states in 2020, thereby postponing the electoral vote count, amounted to a criminal enterprise. Among the charges is a racketeering conspiracy stemming from attempts to challenge the official results of the 2020 election.
As part of his release conditions, President Trump agreed to not “act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a codefendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.” This also applies to “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media.”
He also agreed to “not communicate in any way, directly or indirectly, about the facts of this case with any person known to him to be a codefendant in this case except through his or her counsel.”
‘A Very Sad Day For America’
“I really believe this is a very sad day for America. This should never happen,” President Trump told reporters at the Atlanta International Airport upon his departure after he was released. “If you challenge an election you should be able to challenge an election. I thought the election was a rigged election, a stolen election—and I should have every right to do that. As you know you have many people that you’ve been watching over the years do the same thing.”
He added, “Whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams or many others. When you have that great freedom to challenge you have to be able to otherwise you’re gonna have very dishonest elections. What has taken place here is a travesty of justice—we did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong—and everybody knows it. I’ve never had such support.”
