Wednesday on CNN’s “The Lead,” host Jake Tapper said President Donald Trump retweeting “Britain-first” activist Jayda Fransen and his suggestion the death of a Joe Scarborough aide was unsolved is “fundamentally indecent behavior.”
Tapper said, “That was President Trump in May, a rational, sane speech read from a teleprompter. And quite a different message from this morning when President Trump went on Twitter and retweeted anti-Muslim videos from a far-right group in Europe to his 43 million-plus Twitter followers. His three inflammatory retweets show a young man being beaten and thrown from a rooftop, as well as someone destroying a Virgin Mary statue. The purpose of the videos clearly to depict Muslims as savages, even though it’s not entirely clear that all of the people in the videos are Muslim.”
He continued, “This one, for example, purports to show a migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches, but the embassy of the Netherlands tweeted to President Trump that the perpetrator here was not a migrant. Quote, facts do matter, the embassy said in a tweet. The perpetrator was born and raised in the Netherlands, unquote. So where did President Trump find such vile content, irresponsibly shared devoid of context, false in at least one case, with the sole purpose seemingly of inflaming and encouraging fear and hatred? Well, the original tweets come from this woman, the deputy leader of the extreme right Britain First in the UK. Just last year she was convicted of, quote, religiously aggravated harassment, for harassing a Muslim woman on the street.”
He added, “The president used the loss of this young woman to score this cheap and ugly political point. The pain that her friends and family might feel be damned. That attack, demonizing Muslims, finding favor with notorious bigots on both sides of the Atlantic, all before 9:30 in the morning. It’s apparent that the people around President Trump are unable to stop him from behaving this way, but that doesn’t mean you, and I don’t have to pretend it is happening because this is fundamentally indecent behavior. We cannot excuse it, and we cannot ignore it, and we cannot become numb to it.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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