Trump told Pence he didn't think he would have gotten elected without Twitter: Book

• Trump told Pence many times that he "probably wouldn't have gotten elected without Twitter."
• Trump often greeted his vice president by asking whether he'd seen his tweet.

Former President Donald Trump credited Twitter with helping him win the presidency in 2016, according to a new book out Tuesday by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence wrote in his new book, "So Help Me God," that Trump often told him, "I probably wouldn't have gotten elected without Twitter." In the White House on most days, Pence writes, Trump would greet his vice president with, "Did you see my tweet?"

When Trump was president, Twitter provided him with a way to send his unfiltered thoughts to the masses. While most people in the US don't have a Twitter account, reporters would frequently cover Trump's tweets given that they were considered official White House statements.

With Twitter, the former president would skewer his enemies, fire top officials, and send White House staff scrambling after a single tweet would undo weeks of planning.

In his book, Pence writes that he saw Twitter as providing Trump with "a direct line to the American people."

"He often laughed at how with the press of a button headlines broke all over television," Pence wrote. "Though some tweets were clearly for his own amusement, I came to believe that there was a method to them. With the click of a button on his phone, he would send the media in one direction and we would spend the rest of the day working our agenda."

Twitter booted Trump from its platform after a mob of his supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, citing "the risk of further incitement of violence." At the time, Trump had 89 million followers.

Whether Twitter's new owner, Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk, will re-platform Trump remains an open question.

Musk's personal political leanings are something of a mystery. He's described often as a libertarian, and in a 2018 tweet Musk wrote that he was "registered independent & politically moderate." He said on Twitter this summer that he would support Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president.

In the past, Twitter employees have overwhelmingly donated to Democrats over Republicans, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan money-in-politics research organization OpenSecrets.

Trump has said he doesn't plan to re-join Twitter and is committed to his own social media platform, called Truth Social. Journalists often share Trump's Truth Social posts on Twitter, and report about them.