Elon Musk, Donald Trump play to the gallery

Elon Musk loves the limelight as much as Donald Trump so it’s been no surprise that the new owner of Twitter would launch a poll about whether the former US president should be reinstated on the social platform after he was banned last year for glorifying violence after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington.

A slight majority of Twitter users agreed Trump should be allowed back so, playing Digital God, Musk lifted the suspension.

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Trump, though, was not impressed, preferring instead to stay on the social media platform his media group set up last year.

Another thing the two men share is the way they divide people, almost forcing them into polar-opposite camps.

Musk, of course, can do what he likes with Twitter – it was his $44 billion (about R759 billion) that bought it.

But Trump, who announced last week that he will be running again for the Presidency in 2024, is far more problematic.

His campaign comes at a time when the United States is more divided than it has been since the Civil War in the 1860s.

Much of that division was sowed, or deepened, by Trump’s polarising campaign in 2016 and his conduct in the White House for the four years he was President.

Trump is undoubtedly playing to the gallery of deeply concerned Middle Americans, who believe their country is no longer great.

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They have seen their lives – centred around Guns and God – increasingly under threat from the likes of abortion campaigners Black Lives Matter, the “woke”…and no longer do they believe America should welcome the “tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” as inscribed on the State of Liberty in New York Harbor.

In that, they are much like the worried Britons who voted themselves into a political and social laager at Brexit.

The world is changing, and dividing, around us.