r/The_Donald's Ban and Migration to TheDonald.win / Patriots.win

r/The_Donald grew to roughly 790,000 members and became notorious for racist, misogynistic, and conspiratorial content, the manipulation of Reddit's algorithm to flood r/all, and threats of violence. Reddit quarantined it in June 2019 after users posted content threatening police and public officials in Oregon, 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 based on identity or vulnerability.

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 that closely mimicked 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 other operators relaunched the community 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 U.S. House Select Committee documents that within minutes of a Trump tweet, a TheDonald.win user posted 'Trump Tweet. Daddy Says Be In DC on Jan. 6th,' a thread drawing thousands of comments; users discussed surrounding and occupying the Capitol, which weapons to bring, and bringing restraints for 'citizen's arrests' of lawmakers. The Committee also identified specific forum users who organized travel caravans and offered to sponsor attendees' trips, and a tipster who monitored patriots.win warned authorities beforehand that participants intended to march on the Capitol armed and believed 'no US laws apply.' Reporting by Advance Democracy, The Washington Post, NBC News, and Media Matters separately documented the site's violent rhetoric and its origin as a banned Reddit community.

The case is now a centerpiece of the broader debate over whether platform bans reduce extremist organizing or merely push it to self-hosted, lightly moderated venues where it can grow more dangerous — with the documented runway from a Reddit ban to a self-hosted forum to a violent attack on the seat of government serving as the most consequential single example.