Doanld Trump deleted the video from his Twitter account amid outrage (Archive)
Washington:
United States President Donald Trump shared a video Sunday of a confrontation between anti-Trump protesters and their supporters in which a man chants “white power,” before removing him in the middle of a protest.
“Thanks to the great people at The Villages,” Trump tweeted about the video clip. “The radical left does nothing Democrats will fall in the fall.”
The video apparently filmed in a Florida retirement community shows a man driving a golf cart with the signs “Trump 2020” and “America First”, being interrupted by a protester on the road chanting “racist.”
While yelling at each other, the driver repeatedly utters the words “white power” with his fist raised.
“White power! There you go, white power. Did you hear that?” the protester yells at him.
Trump tweeted the video shortly after 7:30 a.m.But at 11 a.m. it was no longer visible on his Twitter account.
Trump has long been accused of stoking racial tensions, including during the national trial on racial inequality brought about by the death in custody of African-American George Floyd a month ago.
Infamously, after deadly violence pitted neo-Nazis against protesters in the city of Charlottesville in Virginia in 2017, he declared that there were “very good people from both sides.”
The “Villages” video sparked an immediate reaction on social media, and Trump’s allies were pressured to defend him on Sunday morning talk shows.
The only black Republican party senator, Tim Scott, interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union”, called the entire video “offensive.”
“We can play politics with it or we can’t. I’m not going to. I think it’s indefensible. We should eliminate it. That’s what I think.”
Also questioned on CNN, Trump’s health secretary Alex Azar said he had not seen the images or Trump’s tweet.
“But obviously neither the president, his administration, nor I would do anything to support white supremacy or anything to support discrimination of any kind,” Azar said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated channel.)
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