Trump deletes tweet of supporter shouting ‘white
power’ after outrage
Deputy press secretary claims Trump had not heard the
racist language of video he tweeted that was posted for nearly four hours
Tom
McCarthy
@TeeMcSee
Published
onSun 28 Jun 2020 17.43 BST
Donald
Trump has deleted a tweet he sent featuring video of a Trump supporter
shouting, “White power! White power!” after an outpouring of grief and outrage
at racist language flowing directly from the White House once again.
The tweet
was deleted after it drew fierce criticism from across the political spectrum,
including from Tim Scott of South Carolina, the sole African American
Republican in the Senate.
“There’s no
question that he should not have retweeted it and he should just take it down,”
Scott told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
“It was so
profanity laced, the entire thing was offensive. Certainly, the comment about
the white power was offensive. It’s indefensible. We should take it down.”
Trump had
left the tweet, featuring video of arguments among residents of The Villages, a
predominantly white and conservative retirement community in Florida, posted on
his Twitter feed for nearly four hours.
“Thank you
to the great people of The Villages,” Trump tweeted about the footage, which
begins with a white man driving a golf cart with a “Trump 2020” sign spouting
racist rhetoric at white anti-Trump protesters.
White House
deputy press secretary Judd Deere claimed that Trump had not heard the man
screaming “white power” at the start of the video he tweeted.
“President
Trump is a big fan of The Villages,” Deere said in the statement. “He did not
hear the one statement made on the video.”
Cody
Keenan, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, said the tweet was part of
Trump’s re-election strategy.
“How ‘bout
we just skip past the kabuki where White House staff emails reporters
anonymously to say they had nothing to do with it, every [Republican] senator pretends
they haven’t seen it, and just accept that they’re all part of the Trump 2020
white power Covid rally ‘til the end,” Keenan tweeted.
Trump sent
the tweet as he faces a difficult re-election bid, which in part involves a
struggle to shore up support among his base of white and evangelical Christian
voters. Polls indicate that a majority of that demographic has supported
protests over the killing last month of George Floyd, an African American man,
by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The Floyd
protests have launched what could be a moment of reckoning for racial justice,
on issues ranging from unaccountable police killings to Confederate monuments
to criminal justice reforms to the legacy of slavery to reparations.
Yet Trump
has leaned into his opposition to the protests, threatening to deploy the US
military in American cities, promising stiff penalties for defacing statues,
tweeting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – a phrase famously
used in the 1960s by a Miami police chief long accused of bigotry – and
declaring himself the president of “law and order”.
On Sunday
Trump, who is also facing a growing scandal over his handling of the
coronavirus crisis, and intelligence indicating a Russian plot against American
soldiers in Afghanistan, once again sought to stoke racial tensions.
Following
his retweet of footage from The Villages, Trump sent a tweet in all caps that
said, “the vast silent majority is alive and well!!” The phrase “silent
majority” is associated with Richard Nixon’s political strategy to inflame
racial anxiety to win votes.
In a
separate appearance on CBS New’s Face the Nation, vice-president Mike Pence
refused to use the phrase “Black Lives Matter”.
“So you
won’t say ‘black lives matter?’” host John Dickerson asked Pence.
“John, I
really believe that all lives matter,” Pence replied, using a phrase that has
long been criticized for failing to recognize the racism Black Americans face.
Challenged
on Trump’s rhetoric Sunday morning in a separate CNN appearance, health
secretary Alex Azar said he had not seen the most recent tweet – but asserted
that Trump is not supportive of white supremacy.
“I’ve not
seen that video or that tweet, but obviously neither the president, his
administration nor I would do anything to be supportive of white supremacy or
anything that would support discrimination of any kind,” Azar said.
“[O]bviously, the President and I and his whole administration would stand
against any acts of white supremacy.”
But many
critics of the president see him as one of the most powerful proponents of
white supremacy in the country’s history.
Andrew
Stroehlein, European media director of Human Rights Watch, said Trump’s tweet
was “not surprising for a man who’s called neo-Nazis “very fine people” and
hired white nationalists to work in the White House, but still, immensely
dangerous.
“With his
poll numbers falling, he wants a race war,” Stroehlein tweeted.
“Our racist
president, who retweeted a ‘white power’ video today, got caught covering up
that Putin, who got him elected, was paying bounties for murdering American
soldiers,” wrote Walter Shaub, former director of the office of government
ethics, on Twitter. “His response is to lie, attack the press, and take no action
against Putin. Trump is at war with America.”
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