White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday defended President Trump’s retweet a day earlier in which the president shared a video of a man in Florida shouting “white power,” saying he did so to stand up for his supporters.
“The president did not hear that phrase in that portion of the video, and when it was signaled to him that this was in there he took that tweet down,” McEnany told “Fox & Friends.”
“But he made very clear to me that he stands with the people of The Villages, our great seniors, men and women in the Villages who support this president,” she continued. “He stands for them and his point in tweeting out that video was to stand with his supporters who are oftentimes demonized.”
Trump caused intense backlash on Sunday by approvingly sharing a video in which supporters in The Villages, a community for seniors in Florida, were seen clashing with protesters. Within the first 10 seconds of the video, a Trump supporter in a golf cart begins shouting “white power.” The president deleted the tweet after several hours.
“Today the President shared a video of people shouting ‘white power’ and said they were ‘great.’ Just like he did after Charlottesville,” presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden tweeted Sunday, referring to Trump’s widely criticized comments after the deadly clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in 2017.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) called the tweet “offensive” and encouraged the president to remove it.
Neither the president nor any of his aides have condemned the language used by his supporter in the video.
The White House issued a statement on Sunday while Trump was at his golf club in Virginia saying the president “did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”