For a brief moment, he managed to tweet anyhow — not from @realDonaldTrump, his suspended account, but rather the official @POTUS account reserved for the current President of the United States, one that will be handed over to Joe Biden on January 20th.

His message, before it was deleted, cryptically suggested that he will “have a big announcement soon” and that he was looking “at the possibilities of building out our own platform.” Trump is currently deplatformed from most social media.

As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great…

…patriots who voted for me. Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long. I predicted this would happen. We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we…

…also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED! Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely…

Twitter told The Verge earlier today that Trump would not be able to evade a ban by tweeting from a different account, and that his tweets might be deleted if he tweeted from a government account (like @POTUS). BuzzFeed has confirmed with Twitter that is exactly what happened.

If Trump tries to use a non-government account (say, if he created a new account), it would be permanently suspended “at first detection” according to Twitter.

Though the @POTUS account currently has 33.4 million followers, Twitter has said that Biden will not automatically get them — the account will start from zero. But Trump also won’t automatically get to take those followers with him.