Sunday, June 28, 2020

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE TRUMP JUST HAPPENED TO STUMBLE ON THAT "WHITE POWER" VIDEO

Funny how this sort of thing keeps happening.
On Sunday morning, the president of the United States once again showed his racist leanings by retweeting a video of one of his supporters chanting “white power.”

“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!!” Trump wrote in a quote tweet of the video.

The video showed pro and anti-Trump protesters from a community in Florida screaming obscenities at each other. Less than 10 seconds into the video, a man in a golf cart with “Trump 2020” signs could be heard loudly yelling “white power” at least twice.



Trump's quote tweet has been removed, but the original tweet is still up:



This doesn't seem like an account Trump would follow.

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I can imagine Trump searching his own name on Twitter and discovering a tweet that piques his interest, but Trump's name doesn't appear in the tweet.

Deputy press secretary Judd Deere says, "President Trump is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters."

It may or may not be true that the shouts of "white power" were overlooked by Trump, but I suspect that whoever brought this video to Trump's attention -- probably Dan Scavino (the "caretaker of Trump’s explosive Twitter feed," according to Politico) -- noticed them and still believed that the video would be a fine addition to Trump's feed. It's hard to believe he (or whichever aide found this) missed the "white power" shouts.

For most of Trump's presidency, this video might have hit a certain sweet spot: His fans could bond over the generic pro-Trump sentiments that make up most of the video, then the hated liberal media would point out the racist moments, Trump would reluctantly take down the retweet, and the fans would bond again, this time over their hatred of the liberal media.

But after the death of George Floyd, this kind of thing lands differently, even for many heartland whites, in a way it hasn't since Charlottesville.

And yet Team Trump went for it. Maybe they think there was a net gain in base loyalty earlier this month when Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp retweeted a video in which a chainsaw-wielding man in Texas chased away anti-racism protesters while using the N-word. But it's an especially bad time for this sort of thing -- unless the Trumpers are trying to lose in November.

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