President Donald Trump on Sunday morning retweeted a video of senior citizens in Florida participating in a golf-cart parade where one supporter yelled “white power” twice while pumping his fist in the air.
The scene that erupted in The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, took place amid continuing social unrest unfolding across the country over police brutality and racism.
“Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” Trump tweeted. “The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!“
The pro-Trump parader twice exclaimed “white power” while holding a fist and was sitting next to another supporter chanting "Trump." Another person, who appeared to be an anti-Trump protester, pointed toward him and responded: “There you go, white power."
The golf-cart motorcade was met by anti-Trump seniors standing alongside the same road, who held counter-protester signs that read “Trump bigot and racist” and “Donald Trump white trash” and shouted profanities toward the supporters. One among the senior crowd called a supporter a “Nazi racist pig.”
Trump has frequently raised eyebrows over his posts and has previously retweeted white supremacists.
The sprawling retirement community, located near Orlando, is heavily white and conservative — and therefore crucial to Trump’s reelection in Florida, a must-win state for him where the Real Clear Politics polling averages currently show him trailing Democrat Joe Biden by 7 percentage points.
The Villages is in three Florida counties, but much of it is in relatively small Sumter County, where voters turn out at disproportionately higher rates than the rest of the state and disproportionately vote for Republicans.
In 2016, Florida’s Sumter County turnout rate was about 10 points higher than the state’s turnout rate. Trump won nearly 69 percent of the vote in 2016, a net 30,092 votes that accounted for almost 27 percent of his overall statewide victory margin of 112,911 statewide in Florida, which he carried by just 1.19 percentage points. Sumter County is 85 percent non-Hispanic white; according to census figures, whites are 53 percent of Florida’s overall population.
Marc Caputo contributed to this article.
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