President Donald Trump retweeted a video Sunday (June 28) morning of one of his supporters shouting from a golf cart draped in Trump 2020 gear, “white power.”
The incident reportedly took place at the Sumter County retirement community called The Villages in Lady Lake, Florida on June 14. Some of the senior citizens in the community were having a parade in Trump’s honor and at the same time, there was a protest going on against it. This particular offensive interaction was captured on camera, then shared in a tweet that was reposted by the president.
Ten seconds into the video shared by Trump, a man can be seen on a golf cart raising his fist, while engaging with fellow community members who were against the parade, before shouting the racist expression.
The tweet was deleted about three hours later.
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement that Trump did not hear the slogan before making the judgment to post it.
“President Trump is a big fan of The Villages,” Deere said. “He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”
Many of Trump’s supporters make up a good amount of the retired senior citizen population of Florida and he recently got the Republican nomination in Jacksonville.
This isn’t the first time Trump has caused controversy with his tweets. The bird social media platform recently began flagging several of his problematic tweets with “public interest” labels. The first time twitter did this was when Trump glorified violence against protesters during the Minneapolis protests by tweeting the slogan, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” echoing Miami Police Chief Walter Headley, who pledged to use guns and dogs in Black neighborhoods to fight crime. In another tweet, he shared misleading information about COVID-19.
The warning label is put into use when Twitter feels “it may be in the public interest to allow people to view Tweets that would otherwise be taken down.