President briefly shares anti-CNN cartoon
WASHINGTON — President Trump shared on Twitter a cartoon on Tuesday morning of a train running over a person with a CNN logo covering the person’s head, three days after a fatal collision in Charlottesville, Va. Trump deleted his retweet minutes later.
Trump has been under fire for how he has publicly addressed bloody demonstrations by white nationalists over the weekend. Promoting a cartoon of a person being run over by a train appeared to belittle the attack by a driver who ran into a crowd of counterprotesters, leaving a 32-year-old woman dead on Saturday and 19 others injured. An Ohio man has been charged with second-degree murder in the crash.
On Monday, Trump bowed to pressure and condemned white supremacists protesting the removal of a Confederate statue, and the president called racism “evil.” But later Monday, Trump took to Twitter to criticize what he called the fake news media for not being satisfied with his additional remarks.
“Made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realize once again that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied...truly bad people!” he wrote.
A White House official said early Tuesday that the tweet of the train was posted inadvertently and was deleted as soon as it was noticed.
A retweet requires two actions, clicks or taps on a smartphone or computer, in order to post, meaning the president would have had a second chance to be sure he wanted to tweet the cartoon.
The president has long appeared to sanction violence, going back to his campaign when, at a rally, he said he wanted to punch a Black Lives Matter protester in the face. He later said the man, who was assaulted by Trump supporters in the crowd, might have deserved to get roughed up.
Trump and his associates have long been critical of CNN. On Tuesday, the president’s re-election committee criticized CNN for what the committee described as censorship because the news network did not air an advertisement that was released on Sunday.