Retweeting ‘White power!’

President Trump says supporters who scream “White power!” are “great people,” said Dean Obeidallah. Last weekend the president retweeted a two-minute video of residents of a Florida retirement community known as The Villages having a pro-Trump parade of golf carts adorned with signs saying “America First” and “Trump 2020.” When protesters yelled that Trump is a racist, a defiant golf-cart driver yelled, “White power! White power!” A White House spokesman later claimed that Trump hadn’t heard the white supremacist slogan when he praised his supporters as “great,” even though it appears just 10 seconds into the video. The retweet was taken down, but Trump never denounced the supporter’s racist sentiments. In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, an unprecedented number of white Americans are expressing support for Black Lives Matter; even in Mississippi, Republicans voted to remove a Confederate tribute from the state flag. But “Trump has responded in the opposite direction.” He’s denouncing the removal and tearing down of Confederate monuments as an attack on “our heritage,” and is doubling down on white racial grievances and fear. Like the statues now being torn down, Trump is frozen in a past that is fast receding.