Donald Trump has developed an incredibly intense love-hate relationship with Twitter over the course of his presidency. While the social media platform has started fact-checking his tweets, the POTUS continues to use it to spread harmful messages and spin any kind of BS he wants. However, this week – Trump finally realised he went too far on Twitter.
Yesterday, President Trump retweeted a video in which one of his supporters shouts “White power! White power!” during a pro-trump rally at The Villages retirement complex in Florida.
Trump captioned the post “thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!”
The President left the tweet up for four hours before deleting it, and denied he was trying to “capitalise on racial tensions,” according to BBC. White House press secretary Judd Deere also claimed Trump “did not hear” the ‘white power’ comments in the video.
“President Trump is a big fan of The Villages,” Deere said in a statement. “He did not hear the one statement made on the video,” but saw “tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”
Hear about Twitter’s epic troll of Trump on his birthday below:
Twitter users weren’t the only ones calling for Trump to take down the offensive video. Tim Scott – the only African American Republican in the Senate – told CNN’s State of the Union, “there’s no question that he should not have retweeted it and he should just take it down.”
“It was so profanity laced, the entire thing was offensive,” Scott said. “Certainly, the comment about the white power was offensive. It’s indefensible. We should take it down.”
Sadly, it’s not the first time Trump has shared or promoted racist content on Twitter.
Last year, he tweeted that four US congresswomen “should go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” What Trump failed to acknowledge is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar are all US citizens, and three of them were born in the US.
Despite these incredibly racist and offensive tweets, Trump’s ‘white power’ video was the one he chose to delete. As the President continues his bid for re-election and Twitter continues to keep a close eye on his tweets that glorify violence or spread misinformation, is his choice to delete the retweet a strategic one, or is he finally realising the error of his ways? Sadly, there is no proof the latter is true.
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