I originally wrote this article over a year and a half ago, but in light of President Trump’s recent tweet directly targeting Representative Ilhan Omar (which I am intentionally not linking to), it is now more relevant than ever.

Trump released the video just six days after one of his supporters was arrested for threatening Omar’s life, continuing a pattern of blatant disregard for the real-life ramifications of the hate he spews.

In August, 2017, Trump tweeted an image of a train hitting a CNN reporter, just three days after a domestic terrorist — who idolized both the President and Adolf Hitler — killed a woman in Charlottesville.

Growing increasingly frustrated with coverage of his administration, Trump responded to the controversy he created by condemning violence “on both sides” the day of the Charlottesville attack by doing what he does best and hosted a hostile press conference in the lobby of Trump tower.

After making a statement about infrastructure, Trump grew increasingly frustrated as reporters peppered him with leading questions about Charlottesville, which he had already made a second statement addressing, in which he condemned racism as “evil.”

Apparently feeling the heat, the President reverted back to his genuine self and returned to David Duke’s preferred narrative, that the so called “alt-left” was equally complicit in violence, “violently attack[ing] the other group” in Charlottesville.

When Trump defended “the other group” as the real victims, he meant the heavily armed white supremacist terrorists who came from around the country to organize themselves in Charlottesville around the cause of defending a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that he wouldn’t have wanted erected in the first place.

More than anything, this turn of events highlighted the President’s willingness and apparent eagerness to condone violence and hatred.

Of course, this was nothing new by the time of the Charlottesville incident. At a 2016 campaign rally, then-candidate Trump remarked, “if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell … I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”

The same month, Trump also said of a protestor who was being escorted out of a rally in Las Vegas, “he’s walking out with big high-fives, smiling, laughing. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” Less than a month later a protestor being escorted out of another rally was sucker-punched by an attendee.

Two years ago, a Federal judge ruled that three protestors may proceed with their lawsuit against the Trump campaign and two Trump supporters who attacked them, one of whom is a self-described white nationalist. The case was shot down last year by a federal appeals court.

While Federal judges have a tricky task on their hands when it comes to legal cases involving the President, the executives at Twitter Inc. arguably hold far more power over the President as they could easily ban him for violating the site’s “hateful conduct policy.”

Examples of hateful conduct Twitter provides include:

“behavior that incites fear about a protected group”

“references to mass murder, violent events, or specific means of violence in which/with which such groups have been the primary targets or victims”

“repeated and/or or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone”

Though I could dredge up countless examples of past Trump tweets that seem to violate this policy, the President fired off one particularly egregious tweet on Thursday that seems be more than sufficient grounds for Twitter to ban his personal account.

In 2019, after terrorists in Barcelona ran down a tourist crowd and killed 13, Trump tweeted. “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

The tweet appeared to allude to an anecdote Trump told on the campaign trail, in which General John J. Pershing is said to have captured a group of Muslim rebels during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.

The story goes that the General dipped bullets in pigs blood and used them to execute 49 out of 50 of the rebels, sending the last one back to inform the others that if the Americans killed them they wouldn’t get the afterlife they wanted.

Multiple news outlets, Snopes, and a host of other online voices quickly discredited the President’s fake history — there are no records that the events Trump described during his campaign ever occurred.

Not only does the tweet about General Pershing “reference…specific means of violence” as described in Twitter’s conduct policy, in the “how our enforcement works” section of the policy the company stresses that “context matters.”

I’m not quite sure if there could be a worse context to spread lies that encourage violence against specific groups than the Twitter feed of the President of the United States, but the company has remained reluctant to enforce their policy on the most powerful man in the world.

Despite describing “a range of enforcement options” on their website that include “ask[ing] someone to remove the tweet,” and, “suspend[ing] an account,” Trump’s tweet referencing mass murder against a specific group remains online.

I’d like to ask Twitter — did you follow your policy and at least ask Trump to remove the tweet about General Pershing? If not, why? Considering he hasn’t removed it, will you now take the next step and suspend his account per your hateful conduct policy?

I understand it would be hard to stand up to Trump, especially if it would hurt Twitter’s value. But at a certain point we’ve got to put country before profit, so Twitter, please do America a favor and ban Donald Trump before he can do any more damage.

The first amendment may protect the President’s right to use his bully pulpit to spread all the false information and divisive rhetoric he wants, but there’s no law that protects Trump’s right to a Twitter account.