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Imagine if Twitter existed in the late 1930s.
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Now imagine President Franklin Delano Roosevelt regularly forwarding tweets from Adolph Hitler attacking Jews as vermin and complaining that the mayor of Berlin was not doing enough to find a final solution to the problem.
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Such a scenario seems practically unthinkable since the American president at the time would never have stooped to retweeting such heinous propaganda.
Yet today Donald Trump did something that is the modern equivalent of that unthinkable fictional situation by retweeting a post from Katie Hopkins, the British right-wing extremist and political commentator who describes herself in her own Twitter profile as “The Biggest Bitch in Britain.”
Hopkins is notorious for her calls for a “final solution” after a terrorist attack in the UK and for her attributing the blame for the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Jewish support for immigration, so spare us any outrage for the comparisons to Hitler.
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The tweet from Hopkins that Trump forwarded to his followers was an attack on one of the president’s favorite targets in Britain, London Mayor Sadiq Khan. That the white nationalist, anti-immigration newspaper columnist is not a fan of the Muslim London mayor goes without saying as she insulted Khan and linked to a graphic of a news headline about the mayor’s plummeting approval ratings amidst a knife attack in the city.
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The nipple-height Mayor of Londonistan has NEVER been so unpopular. He has MINUS approval ratings because we are stab-city.
London deserves better. Get Khan Out. pic.twitter.com/2bsvI0nenw
— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) August 1, 2019
If there is any good news in Trump’s latest Twitter assault on the London mayor — whom he’s long had a contentious relationship with — it’s that at least he’s not directing his ire at another American city as he has done so viciously with Baltimore this week.
This is not the first time that Trump has retweeted posts from Hopkins, so he is fully aware of the criticism that his forwarding of the thoughts of an infamous British racist will elicit and apparently doesn’t care in the least about the public reaction to his choice of social media missives.
Indeed with Hopkins comparing migrants to cockroaches, her rhetoric is practically identical to Trump’s who has portrayed immigrants as thieves and murderers bringing diseases with them as they enter the United States.
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Meanwhile, Trump continues to claim that he doesn’t “have a racist bone in his body” while retweeting fascistic white nationalist propaganda from one of Britain’s most reviled racists.
It’s not just FDR who is now turning over in his grave. It’s every deceased American president since then. Those American presidents who remain alive are likely simply vomiting into their mouths with every racist tweet that Trump sends.
With former President Jimmy Carter admitting that Trump is an illegitimate president, it’s well past the time to remove this embarrassment of a “leader” from office. With a majority of ouse Democrats now in favor of impeachment proceedings, hopefully, that process will soon be in progress.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Dan Friedman at Mother Jones.
