United States Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, said on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s retweet of a video containing a white power message was offensive and should be removed from Twitter.
“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” programme.
The tweet comes on the heels of Trump’s hostile response to the racial unrest engulfing the US following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes in Minneapolis.
In the tweet, Trump wrote “Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” a retirement community in Florida he visited in 2020. The video shows Trump protesters and supporters shouting profanities at each other. After a protester calls a Trump supporter a racist, the man responds by raising his fist and shouting “white power.”
“It was so profanity laced, the entire thing was offensive. Certainly, the comment about the white power was offensive,” the South Carolina Republican added. “It’s indefensible. We should take it down.”
Trump has been accused of racism by lawmakers for his tweets in the past, including for attacks on Black lawmakers and for telling four congresswomen of colour that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
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