Their manipulation of votes and what was allowed to be on /all is pretty well documented. After a certain point, the_donald and several other right-of-center subs were disallowed entirely to appear on the meta lists.

Honestly? Good. So many of the right wing subs were absolute breeding grounds for content violations regarding hate speech, and the sub mods turned a blind eye. It was plainly obvious they were blatantly bad actors on the site long before they got quarantined and banned.

The original sub was nothing special rule wise in my opinion. Did you ever visit their spinoff own site? It was psychotic in comparison. Kicking them off Reddit was a mistake for society at large.

I mean yes that's my opinion, but it's important to look at possible neutral interpretations.

I don't think there is a neutral interpretation better than "the_donald was a lot of trouble for reddit as a business and social network, because they caused hostility, even by their existence, and it's not reddit's business to make humans less tribal, so why continue supporting them? Especially after they were clearly brigaiding and manipulating front page content. This front page manipulation was different from what the reddit owners wanted to be on the front page, which for the most part is benign and fun stuff that's easy to monetize."

It should be noted we're typing this on one of the most heavily moderated (in both transparent and opaque ways) sites on the Internet.

There was this ongoing war of attrition by Reddit admins on the_donald (and on a lot of other subs, including their big cash cow WallStreetBets)

The admins always had some new rules and some specific ways they had to be enforced, and were always happy to heap ever-increasing punishments on the subreddits capriciously

Oh, you can't say "Retard" any more, if we find any more examples of this prohibited hate speech your subreddit is going to be actioned against. Also we banned half of your most active moderators for wrongthink. We'll continue banning moderators and levying punishments until the situation is rectified.

Whatever it was reddit claimed they did, they couldn't have done because they had already moved to a different site about four months before reddit "kicked them off". The subreddit had been locked the whole time.