Trump ready to say sorry for sharing Britain First tweets
DONALD TRUMP said he was prepared to apologise for sharing inflammatory videos by the far-right Britain First group, as he performed a climbdown in a row with Theresa May.
The Prime Minister rebuked the US president in November after he caused outage in Britain for retweeting three anti-muslim clips to his 40 million Twitter followers.
Mrs May said Mr Trump was “wrong” to retweet the posts, prompting him to hit back and claim she should focus on “terrorism” in the UK instead.
But Mr Trump yesterday defended his decision to share the material online as he told Piers Morgan on ITV’S Good Morning Britain programme that he had known nothing about Britain First when he made the social media postings.
Challenged on whether he would apologise for the furore, Mr Trump said: “If you are telling me they’re horrible people, horrible racist people, I would certainly apologise if you’d like me to do that.”
He told Morgan: “I knew nothing about them and I know nothing about them today other than I read a little bit. Perhaps it was a big story in Britain, perhaps it was a big story in the UK, but in the United States it wasn’t a big story.
“I did a retweet. When you do your own tweeting, or you do your own social media, it’s fine.
“When you do those retweets, it can cause problems, because you never know who’s doing it to start off with.”
The president’s sharing of the controversial videos that were posted by Jayda Fransen, Britain First’s deputy leader, sparked an unprecedented public row with Mrs May.
One of the videos claimed to show a “Muslim migrant” attacking a young Dutch man on crutches, although the claim in the tweet appeared to have little substance.
Mr Trump said he had retweeted the material because he was concerned about the threat posed by radical Islamic extremists.
“They had a couple of depictions of radical Islamic terror. It was done because I am a big believer in fighting radical Islamic terror,” he said.
“This was a depiction of radical Islamic terror.”