But even at the risk of infringing on the principle of free speech and decreasing engagement for a period — which is to say, hurting their own bottom lines — Twitter and Facebook must muzzle Trump as the election nears.

The platforms have already told the president that they won’t host comments suggesting that the election is being stolen, and he continued posting them. Why would anyone expect him to listen when they tell him not to question the outcome of the election or call on supporters to contest it with violence? This is someone who literally shared fake news when he recently tweeted an article about Twitter’s temporary outage from a satirical website. It is time to proactively silence him from both platforms.

In the past few weeks, between his jaw-dropping, raving debate performance and his frenetic late-night tweeting while in treatment for his coronavirus infection, the president has been entering a dangerously desperate moment. Losing an election is a personal rejection by the people and isn’t easy for any politician to swallow. Losing an election while facing bankruptcy and countless criminal investigations is much harder. The president, if the New York Times’s tax research is to be believed, is too broke to lose.