Surprise! Donald Trump retweeted another white supremacist
Donald Trump celebrated last night’s resounding victory in the New York GOP primary the way he knows best: by retweeting the congratulatory message of a Hitler-admiring, Muslim-hating, Trump-supporting white supremacist.
Trump has yet to delete the tweet from a Twitter user named Jason Bergkamp (aka @keksec_org). As in times past when the GOP frontrunner has retweeted white supremacists, the offending tweet itself is neutral in content. It praises Trump’s policies and shows a photograph of Trump with daughter Ivanka Trump, whom he is not dating:
When you look back at Bergkamp’s old tweets, however, you begin to see the problem, and why a politician attempting to moderate his message for a general election might not want to be connected to him.
Bergkamp’s previous tweets have celebrated Adolf Hitler, spread the hashtag #WhiteGirlsAreMagic with photos of scantily-clad women, and declared the entire country of Saudi Arabia to be wicked. Bergkamp also tweeted an illustration depicting Trump, as a Nazi, gassing Hillary Clinton in a death chamber. And that’s just the past 24 hours.
This, of course, is far from the first time that Trump has shared the encouraging words of an unsavory supporter. Trump has retweeted an inaccurate, racist graphic about black-on-black shootings in America, from a self-identifying neo-Nazi; he followed that up by retweeting a Twitter user who goes by “WhiteGenocide.”
My colleagues at Fusion built a handy bot to track the Twitter bios of everyone Trump retweets; and while the billionaire most often retweets his son (nepotism!), he slips up and shares the words of racists far more often than you might expect.
Unsurprisingly, a recent study found that those retweeted by Trump tend to follow a worrying number of white supremacist Twitter accounts; this latest gaffe won’t help those statistics.
Donald Trump surrogate and fellow gaffe factory Ben Carson recently opined that Trump’s Twitter usage was becoming a problem and a distraction. The doctor may have been right about that one.