Former Vice President Joe Biden responded to Donald Trump’s re-tweeting of a video showing one of his supporters shouting “white power,” saying that the president’s actions compared to his “both sides” statement in Charlottesville and showed that Trump had “picked a side.”
“Today the President shared a video of people shouting ‘white power’ and said they were ‘great.’ Just like he did after Charlottesville. We’re in a battle for the soul of the nation — and the President has picked a side. But make no mistake: it’s a battle we will win,” he tweeted .
On Sunday morning, Trump retweeted a video that showed a demonstrator in a golf cart with a “Trump 2020” sign encountering anti-Trump protesters. The person shouts “white power” at least twice during the clip.
The video was immediately met with pushback from people who said that the president was publishing overtly racist content, as The Inquisitr previously reported.
While Trump didn’t expressly address the “white power” comment, he thanked his supporters and vowed to beat Biden in the upcoming election.
The tweet was later deleted, but not before it was met with outrage from numerous public figures. Sen. Bernie Sanders also criticized Trump’s retweet with a message on social media.
“Just when you think Trump cannot be more vile or racist, he outdoes himself. This morning he shared a video in which a supporter of his yells, ‘white power.’ Let us stand together and make certain that this ‘stable genius’ is defeated, and defeated badly, in November,” he tweeted .
In 2017, Trump said that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the argument in Charlottesville, Virginia. While the comments have been attributed to Trump saying both the white supremacists present at the event and those demonstrating against it were good people, others argue that the president was talking specifically about the issue of whether to remove Confederate statues.
The controversy comes as demonstrators across the U.S. continue to march for equality. After George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis late last month, protests erupted across the county in support of Black Lives Matter and against police brutality.
Trump has taken some criticism for appearing to not support the movement. At one point, he oversaw the removal of protesters from outside of the White House so that he could take photos while standing in front of a church in Lafayette Square. He has also called on local leaders to squash demonstrations, which have sometimes turned violent.
