Hours after denouncing white nationalists, Trump uses Twitter to amplify them

Less than 24 hours after bowing to public pressure and explicitly condemning white nationalists from the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump spent his morning amplifying their voices on social media.

Clearly unhappy that the media continued to criticise his response to this weekend’s violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesvile, Virginia after his new comments on Monday, Trump took to Twitter to vent.

“The #Fake News Media will never be satisfied”, he said. “Truly bad people!”

Just hours later the president took things a step further, retweeting a user called Jack Posobiec to his 36 million followers.

While the Tweet itself — suggesting the media should cover crime in a major city with a large black population rather than focus on white nationalist violence — may not have proven controversial, its author certainly did.

Posobiec is an alt-right activist who, among a litany of other things, pushed bizarre conspiracy theories accusing Hillary Clinton loyalists of operating a child sex-trafficking operation out of a Washington, D.C. pizza shop.

Posobiec also helped spread false claims that the Democratic National Committee was responsible for the death of former staffer Seth Rich, a conspiracy theory that was picked up by Fox News.

MOST POPULAR STORIES ON YAHOO UK:

British banker accidentally flies to Las Vegas instead of Stansted after boarding the wrong flight
Paedophile is shot dead and hung from a crane in brutal public execution
London’s Holborn Underground station evacuated as smoke fills platform after ‘loud bang’
Charlottesville: Twitter users name and shame white supremacists at far-right rally
Kim Jong Un backs down as US warns: ‘This could escalate into war very quickly’

Trump spreading the message of a leading figure in the online far-right could be seen as an approving nod to the group just hours after he denounced racism as evil.

“Those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans”, said Trump in a statement on Monday from the White House Diplomatic Room.

The comments came after Trump was widely criticized for only knocking violence from “many sides” at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

And just hours after a 32-year-old counter-protester was fatally run over at the white nationalist rally, the president shared a cartoon of a figure labeled ‘CNN’ seemingly being hit by a train labeled ‘Trump’. A caption reads “Fake news can’t stop the Trump train”.

It’s not clear who exactly — if anyone — is behind the account that first tweeted the image, but it’s similar to other popular pro-Trump memes that have circulated around the far-right internet on Reddit, Twitter and Facebook.

Trump deleted that retweet as it was being widely criticised as insensitive following the weekend’s events. He also deleted another retweet on Tuesday morning after he appeared to accidentally promote a British user who called him a “fascist” and left the insult visible on his page for several minutes before it was removed.