A Former CIA Officer Wants To Buy Twitter Just To Delete Trump's Account

The president's Twitter habits have become a concern for many, but one woman is on a mission to stop his spontaneous posts altogether. Valerie Plame Wilson, a former CIA officer, wants to buy a controlling share of Twitter so she can kick Trump off the site.

"Donald Trump has done a lot of horrible things on Twitter. From emboldening white supremacists to promoting violence against journalists, his tweets damage the country and put people in harm's way," Wilson's GoFundMe page says. "But threatening actual nuclear war with North Korea takes it to a dangerous new level. It’s time to shut him down."

Wilson told Refinery29 she was initially disappointed Twitter hadn't taken action regarding Trump's account, and she thinks the company turned a blind eye and ignored its own rules. "If emboldening white supremacists and threatening nuclear war don’t violate Twitter’s community standards, what does?" she said.

So, she decided to raise money in an attempt to take control of Twitter. Her fundraiser, launched on August 16, hasn't come close to its $1 billion goal (Wednesday afternoon it had surpassed $11,000), but Wilson's real aim was to highlight how dangerous Trump's tweets could be and raise money for a cause she really cares about: "preventing the catastrophic use of nuclear weapons."

Wilson (formerly Valerie Plame) was revealed as a covert CIA operative in 2003 because of a State Department leak, and she resigned in 2005. She's now an author and anti-nuclear activist.

Because President Trump has repeatedly threatened North Korea on Twitter, she's worried he's already damaging international relations and has brought us much closer to nuclear war.

"Every scenario involving military force runs the risk of triggering a brutal war or even a nuclear exchange," she told Refinery29. "Obviously the crisis isn't all [Trump's] fault — the Kim regime bears a lot of responsibility — but Trump's tweets only make a bad situation worse. It's incredibly dangerous."

Although experts don't think North Korea will attack the U.S. soon, Chinese scholars agree that the president is escalating the situation.

If the online campaign doesn't raise the full $1 billion needed to buy a controlling interest in Twitter, Wilson plans to donate the money to the nonprofit Global Zero, which aims to prevent nuclear war.

"This isn’t about suppressing free speech online," Wilson wrote on her GoFundMe. "It’s about taking a stand against reckless bravado and threats of nuclear violence that could have horrific consequences in the real world."