7/4/20
Amid historic nationwide protests calling for racial justice, President Donald Trump retweeted a video last Sunday showing a supporter yelling "white power!" Then, more than three hours and thousands of views later, the tweet was deleted and the White House issued a statement claiming the president "did not hear" what the supporter could clearly be heard saying. As startling as it was, it was only the latest instance of the president using his vast social media presence to magnify racist messaging to a segment of his political base, ahead of the November election. One critic says it's part of a growing pattern on the part of Trump, his campaign and allies to push racially inflammatory language and then, after widespread outrage, claim ignorance. Leah Wright Rigueur, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of "The Loneliness of the Black Republican," calls that pattern "convenient." "If it was actual ignorance, we wouldn't see this happening repeatedly and we also wouldn't see the same kind of targeted type of retweets, tweeting commentary, etc. So, it just seems like a very convenient shield as defense to use, when once again they find themselves in the position that they're often in," Rigueur told ABC News.
Days after he retweeted the "white power" clip, despite criticism from even members of his own Republican Party, the president had yet to condemn the racist message he had promoted. The White House said deleting the tweet was enough. The pattern goes beyond the president's own words and actions. Earlier in June, senior Trump campaign adviser and former White House aide Mercedes Schlapp shared a disturbing video on her Twitter page featuring a man wielding a chainsaw and yelling the n-word while chasing away demonstrators protesting the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Schlapp later claimed she did not hear the racist language that appears immediately in the clip. All this comes after Trump, in late May, at the height of the George Floyd protests, tweeted, "Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way," he continued, "Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts." While it remains to be seen whether the president's racial messaging through retweets and reposting will work, many corporations have backed the Black Lives Matter movement, announcing their support -- via social media campaigns.
