Donald Trump on Sunday shared a video that appeared to show one of his supporters yelling “white power” at a group of people protesting the president in a Florida retirement community.
The video, apparently first shared Saturday on Twitter by user @davenewworld_2, captures a series of tense exchanges between Trump supporters and protesters in The Villages, an overwhelmingly white community that describes itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown.”
“Where’s your white hood?” one protester holding a “Make American Sane Again” sign shouts at two people driving by in a golf cart decorated with pro-Trump placards.
“Yeah, you got it! White power! White power!” the driver yells back at the group as the woman next to him chants, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
Trump, in a since-deleted retweet that shared the video to his more than 82 million followers, thanked the “great people” of The Villages.
“The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall,” he wrote.
In another portion of the roughly two-minute video, a Trump protester yells “Fuck Trump!” at another apparent supporter in a golf cart.
“Nasty language,” the woman in the golf cart responds.
“Listen to the president if you want nasty language, you idiot,” the protester shouts back. The same protester can be heard calling Trump supporters “Nazis” several times in the video.
Neither the White House nor The Villages immediately responded to requests for comment.
Twitter users condemned the president’s apparent praise for his supporter chanting “white power.”
“An older white man yelling ‘white power’ at another white man in a homogeneous community from a golf cart as he drives on to catch (his tee time? Matlock reruns?) is the perfect metaphor for all that Trump, and his enablers stand for,” tweeted Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.).
Some Twitter users drew comparisons between Trump’s decision to tweet the video of the man shouting “white power” and his long history of making racist comments and defending white supremacists.
In 2017, Trump prompted bipartisan backlash for claiming there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A year earlier, when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed him for president, Trump initially claimed that he hadn’t heard of Duke and refused to disavow his support. He eventually condemned Duke a few days later.
The president said right-wing protesters who gathered to oppose stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic were “great people,” though some were carrying Nazi flags and nooses.
During an interview on CNN’s “State Of The Union,” Republican senator Tim Scott said Trump should take down the tweet, calling the entire video “offensive.”
It’s unclear at exactly what time Trump deleted the tweet.