On June 29, 2020, "Reddit banned the subreddit for frequent rule-breaking, antagonizing the company and other communities, and failing to "meet our most basic expectations."

[5] For a period of time, the subreddit repeatedly posted an image of Hillary Clinton kissing Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

[9][2] Around this time, members of the then-recently quarantined white nationalist subreddit r/European began migrating to r/The_Donald, causing tensions with the userbase.

As her replacements were accused of being too liberal and of instituting censorship, several users and the previously purged moderators moved to a new subreddit named r/Mr_Trump.

[4] The subreddit hosted "Ask Me Anythings" (AMAs) of notable right-wing, conservative figures supportive of Trump including Scott Adams, Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, Helmut Norpoth, Curt Schilling, Peter Schweizer, Roger Stone, Milo Yiannopoulos,[13] Tucker Carlson,[14] and Corey Stewart.

[18] In September 2016, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, introduced a non-profit organization on r/The_Donald called "Nimble America" with the stated purpose of creating and spreading pro-Trump Internet memes through "Facebook ads, billboards, and 'website ops'".

[25] The subreddit frequently attempted to manipulate Amazon.com's booklist via vote brigading, or encouraging subscribers to cast a certain review en masse.

[27] Later, in September 2017, the subreddit attempted to buy copies of Trump's Great Again: How To Fix Our Crippled America to outsell Hillary Clinton's then-upcoming book What Happened.

"[30] One week later, Huffman apologized for his actions, and offered a filter feature to the website, allowing users to exclude subreddits from their r/all page.

[32][33][34] In the beginning of January 2017, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, which alleged that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government.

[35] Later that day, Republican senator John McCain confirmed that he had sent the dossier to FBI director James Comey several months earlier.

[38][39] The post was deleted some time on August 13, 2017, a day after the rally ended in the first-degree murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer and the injury of 19 others by white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr.[40][41] Members of the subreddit maintained a Discord server called "Centipede Central", which peaked at 16,000 active users in October 2017[42][43] and was among the largest servers on Discord.

[79] Additionally, users were often apt to flood the website with waves of identical images or posts, a direct violation of site-wide policies regarding spam.

"[82] The subreddit received additional coverage on November 24, 2016, when Reddit CEO Steve Huffman admitted to editing r/The_Donald users' comments that were critical of him, in response to harassment[83] by the community.

[88] A conspiracy theory involving the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria attracted attention on r/The_Donald.

Several members of the community created the r/pizzagate subreddit which was subsequently banned by Reddit administrators for breaking site rules regarding sharing personal information of others.

[89][90] In December 2016, the subreddit gained media attention when it linked a knee injury sustained by NBA player Andrew Bogut to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

Multiple sources, including The New York Times, NBC News, the BBC, and The Washington Post, reported that the clip appeared on the subreddit about four days earlier.

[106][107] CNN was accused by Julian Assange, Jack Posobiec, and Mark Dice of blackmailing the user, while the hashtag, #CNNBlackmail, trended on Twitter.

[109] In response to the controversy, ShadowMan3001, one of the moderators of the subreddit, told Kevin Roose of The New York Times that CNN's intent in possibly releasing the user's identity was "a glaring example of their absolute lack of not only journalistic integrity, but basic morality".

[110] In March 2018, The Daily Beast obtained documents from the Russian-backed online "troll farm" Internet Research Agency that confirmed that the organization deployed its agitators on subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/HillaryForPrison in the run-up to the 2016 election.

[111] During that same month, congressional investigators revealed that they plan to question Reddit and Tumblr as part of their investigation into the Russian interference surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election with Representative Adam Schiff urging Reddit and other major online platforms to make more data available about the extent of Russia's online propaganda efforts.

[114] As a meme "Remove Kebab", based on the music video called "Serbia Strong" by a group of soldiers celebrating the Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžić has appeared in over 800 threads on the r/The_Donald.

[114] The band's accordion player Novislav Đajić, convicted in 1997 of crimes during the Yugoslav wars, features in meme images and is known as "Dat Face Soldier".

It is an article of faith among posters that anti-racists are the real bigots, feminists are the actual sexists, and progressive politics are, in effect, regressive.

[4] Gizmodo commented that the subreddit "revealed how easy the site's ageing algorithm is to game," comparing their actions to the profitability of fake news posted on Facebook.

[63] In February 2017, after Kellyanne Conway brought up the false Bowling Green massacre, SFGate noted that the subreddit's response to the incident was "varied – and rather muted".

[22] In October 2019, U.S. House Representative Jim Banks criticized Reddit's decision to quarantine the subreddit, calling it "a recent and egregious example of social media sites meddling in political affairs.

[134] According to a January 16, 2021 report from The Wall Street Journal, Epik had threatened to take TheDonald.win offline over the forum failing to remove white supremacist, racist, and violent content.

[137] On August 27, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the Capitol attack demanded records from Patriots.win (alongside 14 other social media companies) going back to the spring of 2020.