The week of Sunday, January 3rd through Saturday, January 9th, 2021 was a non-stop earthquake. Originally we had grander plans to commemorate it here on National Zero, but unfortunately here in 2022 life got in the way, with a sick toddler demanding more attention and time than could be devoted to recounting the crucial stretch as it we reported it here – and the many important developments behind the scenes made public in the year since. No regrets or apologies on that, just a simple acknowledgement of what could had been if the Deep State hadn’t invented germs.

Between the recording of Trump’s “I just want to find 11,780 votes” call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger being handed to the Washington Post, the split in the House and GOP caucuses over whether or not to certify the 2020 election, the stunning victory by Democrats Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock in the crucial Georgia runoff Senate election, the heated run up over Pence’s role in the certification, the Stop the Steal rally on the Ellipse in Washington DC, the Capitol riot itself – and its immediate fallout, Congress’s final certification of Biden’s 2020 victory, the House Dems announcing they would soon impeach Trump for the second time in 13 months, and the blockbuster Reuters report on the discovery of dwarf giraffes living in separate parts of Africa, it was like seeing a whole year’s worth of news crammed into one week.

The important giraffes story was quickly overshadowed by Twitter dropping a bomb:

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1347684877634838528

True to its brand of lording such alacrity in reporting important developments in politics sooner than a certain other site, National Zero staff frequently takes advantage of opportunities to remind readers that the four minute turnaround for reporting the ban at 6:25 pm on January 8th was four earlier than that other site’s 6:29 pm timestamp for their article reporting the same, a victory that can never be taken away, no matter how many comments containing “NationalZero.com” are blocked by that other site’s Disqus profanity filter out of obviously tearful jealousy and butthurt.

The ban itself was not a major surprise considering the long and sordid history of Trump’s use of Twitter to spread lies and hatred, and it had been widely expected to come once he was finally out of office on January 20th, 2021, due to Twitter’s policies against banning actively serving public officials for any reason. Twitter’s long-standing hands off attitude toward Trump had began to change with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lead up to the 2020 election, and in May 2020 the network’s moderation team began applying warning labels to Trump’s misinformation-laden tweets on the coronavirus and various grievances about voting. The penultimate strike from Twitter’s moderation team came during the final stages of the Capitol riot as Trump was locked out of his account for 12 hours after tweeting this on the evening of January 6th, 2021:

There were three more tweets sent from his account, the last one being Trump announcing he would skip the inauguration (which we later found out was him getting ahead of Moscow Mitch’s planned public announcement that Trump was officially disinvited). That evening he was gone.

Without getting too much into the weeds about whether this was too little too late (it was, but who knows what kind of shit would’ve happened had they let it slide), we do give props to Twitter for finally pulling the trigger and sticking to it. As we said, writing on the wall was pretty clear they were planning to do it 12 days later anyway. The outrages had piled up so high there was almost certainly no way @realDonaldTrump would have made it out of January 2021 intact.

Of all the horrible shit Trump tweeted over the years and the multi-day media controversies that ensued, one of them largely forgotten still sticks out like a rusty butcher knife standing up on a floor full of broken glass: Trump’s May 2020 campaign of harassment of former Congressman and current MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough over the tragic death of a staffer at his district office in 2001, implying that Scarborough had somehow murdered her. It wasn’t the first time Trump had brought it up, but this was coming in the months into the Coronavirus pandemic, when thousands of Americans were getting infected and dying every day. It really showed what kind of sick, twisted fuck the Former Guy is, and why we’re all better off not having him tweet hundreds of times a week. Yes, Trump still has his spokesworm Liz Harrington tweeting out his bullshit statements, and the “Truth Social” network is allegedly going to finally launch next month. It’s still not now and not likely to ever give him the same reach he once had when Twitter dicked around.

So Happy Deathday @realDonaldTrump, and glad @mtgreenee is burning with you in digital hell.