That he has a tiny number of twitter fans--too tiny to build a platform on.

He uses twitter because the influencers are on twitter. There's a reason he posts there instead of on his campaign website.

If he really thought leaving twitter wouldn't cost him anything, he would have done it already.

> That he has a tiny number of twitter fans--too tiny to build a platform on

He has 80m followers on twitter alone, that's ~20% of all twitter users, even if half of that followed him to a new platform it would be instantly legitimized, it doesn't have to be bigger than twitter to be a success. That's without considering all the ancillary support from Trump media allies who would direct all their fans to engage on Trump's new platform for the sake of freedom and free speech in America.

> If he really thought leaving twitter wouldn't cost him anything, he would have done it already.

I believe it's the next logical step. Twitter doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, the media will report on whatever Trump says no matter where he posts it and his supporters will inevitably skip the reports and go directly to the source.

>He has 80m followers on twitter alone, that's ~20% of all twitter users,

Many of his followers are bots, and almost 75% haven't logged in more than 120 days. I'd be very surprised if more than 10% of his followers were real and active.

>I believe it's the next logical step.

If it was that easy he would've done it already if just for the ego boost. Twitter is getting him something that he doesn't think he can get on his own.

>his supporters will inevitably skip the reports and go directly to the source.

Again, my family is full of trump supporters and none of them read his tweets directly.

It would be completely different and give his ridiculous nonsense an appropriate context. Think about how every NBA game, breakfast show, mayonnaise commercial, news outlet shows people's tweets to make people feel connected through social networking. It's hyper-branded as Twitter, as tweets. Fox news and OANN are not going to be able to give the cultural relevancy to kkknet or whatever they'd call their alternative.

Social media companies always act like they are completely guiltless in the rise of the harmful far-right, but these far-right people exploit their inventions to obtain cultural relevancy. The right truly struggles to create culture on their own