CNN’s Jake Tapper twice on Sunday asked two different guests, one a White House official, the other a former official, to react to a video President Trump had “retweeted” only moments before.
The video, since removed from the president’s timeline, shows a bunch of old people yelling at each other, some Trump supporters, others not. At the very beginning, one of the Trump supporters riding in a golf cart yells, “White power!”
“I’m stunned that the president retweeted this video in which one of his apparent supporters shouts ‘white power,'” Tapper said to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “I assume that’s not a message you stand by.”
Azar said he hadn’t yet seen the video so he couldn’t comment other than to say of course the administration was against discrimination or any demonstration of “white supremacy.”
Tapper then asked Azar if he thought it was a “mistake by the president to tweet a video in which one of his apparent supporters says white power very clearly on the video?” Azar gave the same answer.
Later on, Tapper asked former national security adviser John Bolton about the video.
But what Tapper didn’t explain at any point was that the man who yelled “white power” was only taunting a man already yelling at him, over and over again, calling him a racist.
In the video, you see a line of golf carts like a mini-parade, and they have pro-Trump signs on them. On the sidelines are Trump detractors yelling “Racist!” at all of the carts passing by. And so one of them yells back, “Yeah? White power! White power!”
It was obviously intended as a rejoinder to the man calling him a racist simply for supporting the president. It doesn’t appear to be a declaration of his fealty to the Ku Klux Klan, but an annoyed expression of the meaninglessness in 2020 of calling anyone racist, since liberals have defined the word as “anyone I disagree with.”
The video was later removed from Trump’s Twitter feed because obviously, it’s not a good look to share that kind of content regardless. But it certainly doesn’t look like what Tapper portrayed it to be.
