r/The_Donald's Ban and Migration to TheDonald.win / Patriots.win
2019–2022
After years of warnings and a 2019 quarantine, Reddit banned the pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald in June 2020. Its community had already built and migrated to the independent site TheDonald.win (later patriots.win), which reputable reporting and the official January 6th Committee report later tied to violent rhetoric and planning around the 2021 Capitol attack.
What happened
r/The_Donald grew to roughly 790,000 members and became notorious for racist, misogynistic, and conspiratorial content and threats of violence. Reddit quarantined it in June 2019, then banned it on June 29, 2020 as part of a sweep of about 2,000 communities under a revised content policy prohibiting content that incites violence or promotes hate.
Deplatforming had limited effect because the community had prepared an exit. The domain thedonald.win was anonymously registered in July 2019, and by November 2019 moderators were promoting it as a backup forum mimicking Reddit's interface. After the ban, users migrated en masse; by December 2020 the standalone site ranked among the most-visited U.S. websites. In January 2021 a power struggle led owner Jody Williams to shut down TheDonald.win on January 21, 2021, after which moderators relaunched as patriots.win.
In the weeks before January 6, 2021, the forum hosted open discussion of attacking the Capitol. The official Final Report of the House Select Committee documents that within three minutes of a Trump tweet, a TheDonald.win user posted 'Trump Tweet. Daddy Says Be In DC on Jan. 6th,' a thread drawing nearly 6,000 comments; users discussed surrounding and occupying the Capitol, which weapons to bring, and bringing zip ties for 'citizen's arrests.' Reporting by Advance Democracy, The Washington Post, NBC News, and Media Matters documented the site's violent rhetoric and its origin as a banned Reddit community.
Impact
The episode became a defining case study in the limits of deplatforming: removing a community from a mainstream platform did not dissolve it but pushed it onto a self-hosted, lightly moderated site where violent rhetoric flowed more freely. TheDonald.win / patriots.win went on to host some of the most explicit pre-January 6 planning content, drawing FBI interest, congressional records demands, and extensive coverage in the official January 6th Committee report. It fuels the broader debate over whether platform bans reduce or merely relocate extremist organizing.