Mike Pence to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration as Donald Trump loses digital pulpit
US Vice-President Mike Pence will attend the inauguration of Joe Biden, the latest loyalist to abandon an increasingly isolated Donald Trump.
Mike Pence will attend the inauguration of Joe Biden, multiple media reports said late on Sunday, the US Vice-President becoming the latest loyalist to abandon an increasingly isolated President Donald Trump.
The news came as House of Representatives Democrats prepared impeachment papers against the President for inciting insurrection after his supporters stormed the Capitol Building last week, and after he was banned from Twitter and a social media platform used by a lot of his supporters was shut down by digital giants.
On Sunday night, Amazon suspended Parler, sending the social media network offline after it was banned by Apple and Google for allowing “threats of violence” in the wake of the deadly riot at the Capitol.
Twitter announced on Saturday it was permanently suspending Mr Trump’s Twitter account, robbing him of his favourite means of communication. “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them, we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said.
Shortly before the suspension, Mr Trump tweeted: “The 75,000,000 great American patriots who voted for me, America FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any shape or form”.
Republican senator Ted Cruz, tweeted that the decisions by the digital giants were “absurd & profoundly dangerous”. “Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?”
One of Mr Trump’s last tweets was to say he would not attend Mr Biden’s inauguration, making him the first president since Andrew Johnson in 1868 to refuse to attend the swearing in of his successor. “To those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20,” he tweeted.
Relations between Mr Trump and Mr Pence — unfailingly loyal to the President for the past four years — have nosedived since Thursday, when the Vice-President formally announced Mr Biden’s victory in the November 3 election.
House Democrats are preparing to introduce articles of impeachment against Mr Trump this week as calls grow for him to resign immediately. Democrats and some Republicans are also stepping up pressure on Mr Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment declaring the President unfit for office to remove him from power.
Mr Trump “has done something so serious that there should be prosecution against him,” house Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as she called on the President to resign “immediately”.
Messages of support for the rioters along with calls for new demonstrations had flourished on Parler, leading Google to remove it from its app store on Saturday, followed by Apple on Sunday.
Amazon then moved to wipe it from its cloud hosting Amazon Web Services, pushing it offline entirely.
In a letter to Parler, Amazon said the network was not acting quickly enough against violent content on the platform.
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