Donald Trump Retweets Troll Account With Quote From Fascist Dictator Mussolini
We’re going down the rabbit hole once again.
The GOP frontrunner and presumptive nominee for the GOP nomination, Donald Trump, once again was caught quote-tweeting a white supremacist. This isn’t a one-off instance.
And quoting a guy who follows the US Fascist party. This is part of Trump’s twitter strategy @howiewolf pic.twitter.com/wUVTGeZNi0
— lawhawk (@lawhawk) February 28, 2016
He keeps doing it.
Every few days he finds some white supremacist or fascist account to quote-tweet.
62% of the People Donald Trump RTed This Week Follow Multiple White Supremacist Accounts https://t.co/crOGRAhMci pic.twitter.com/QrIEVkxzoF
— lawhawk (@lawhawk) January 28, 2016
The source for @realDonaldTrump’s tweet? An actual neo-Nazi. That’s whose dangerous racist lies he wants to amplify: https://t.co/ubTBwIUOiI
— Anil Dash (@anildash) November 23, 2015
For any other candidate in any other year, this would have terminated their campaign. This isn’t like any other election year, and Donald Trump isn’t like any other candidate.
Those tweets are actually garnering little in the way of opposition from within the GOP. And now, he’s garnered support of noted racist/white supremacist and former Grand Dragon of the KKK David Duke and yet he keeps playing games.
Donald Trump wouldn’t disavow David Duke’s support for his presidential bid, saying Sunday that he knows nothing about the white supremacist leader.
“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists,” he said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know — did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.”
You simply cannot make this stuff up.
Trump claims to have a perfect memory, and can’t recall that he went after Duke in 2000.
Donald Trump knew David Duke was a klansman in 2000, yet denies knowledge of him now. https://t.co/P3eMUj3lWP pic.twitter.com/kJQUKqMxim
— Justin Green (@JGreenDC) February 28, 2016
Now, Trump refuses to disavow Duke.
It’s all part of a pattern that has long been undeniable for months. Trump is actively soliciting, and pandering to, white supremacists and racists that form a significant portion of the GOP base. It’s part of the reason that the GOP isn’t pushing back against the racist and white supremacist and fascist statements Trump has made over the past few months. They’re increasingly worried that they’ll lose critical votes.
All of Trump’s statements and actions, and the counter-actions by the GOP are symptomatic of the rot in the GOP itself. They’ve spent years cultivating anger, fear, and hatred among the GOP base. Now, they’ve found the guy that epitomizes all that in Trump.
It looks like Gawker decided to test whether Trump would quote-tweet anything that sounded like a compliment, no matter how extreme or the source.
Trump willingly quote-tweeted the Mussolini quotes posted by the Gawker dummy account ilduce2016. Gawker salted that account’s timeline with Mussolini quotes and included white supremacists among its followers.
The problem isn’t that Gawker did this. It’s that Trump keeps quote-tweeting these extremist statements without pause. Every few days he does it. Without fail.
Here’s Trump’s response when asked about this latest retweet issue on Meet the Press today: