The sun had barely risen by the time the president had used Twitter to lash out at TV executives, peddle a conspiracy theory and relay far-right anti-Muslim videos

Dissemination of violent videos that incite hatred against Muslims, libelous slurs directed at top television executives, the rehash of an old discredited conspiracy theory, a threat to boycott a major news outlet.

Just another busy morning of tweets at the White House.

No 10 condemns Trump retweeting of UK far-right leader’s anti-Muslim videos Read more

Except was it? Even by the standards of this most exceptional of US presidents, the stream of bile that poured from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed from the early hours of Wednesday morning left observers struggling to find the words.

“It’s abominable,” said Heidi Beirich, a leading monitor of hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “This isn’t a joke. When you depict Muslims in this way it can lead to hate violence.”

Britain First

Beirich was responding to the three videos Trump retweeted from the account of Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of the far-right UK group Britain First. The videos, which were either fake or of dubious veracity, purported to show Muslims beating up and killing people and smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Fransen was arrested earlier this month over a speech she gave in Belfast in the summer. Trump’s effective endorsement of her and her virulent strain of Islamophobia was instantly denounced by Brendan Cox, husband of Jo Cox, the British MP who was murdered in June 2016 by a man with far-right associations who shouted “Britain first!” as he shot and stabbed her.

Q&A Who are Britain First? Show Hide Britain First is an Islamophobic group​ run by convicted racists.​ It was founded in 2011 by former members of the far-right British National Party (BNP) and loyalist extremists in Northern Ireland. It organises mosque invasions where followers, often dressed in paramilitary uniforms, raid multicultural areas in the UK. The group has an influential presence on Facebook and actively uses social media to publicise anti-Islamic material.



Its leader, Paul Golding, a former BNP councillor, and his deputy Jayda Fransen have been arrested several times.​ Fransen was found guilty in November 2016 of religiously aggravated harassment after she hurled abuse at a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.​ A month later Golding was ​jailed for eight weeks for breaching a court order banning him from entering a mosque. Rightwing terrorist Thomas Mair shouted “Britain first” before killing the MP Jo Cox during the EU referendum campaign in 2016.

“Trump has legitimised the far right in his own country, now he’s trying to do it in ours. Spreading hatred has consequences & the President should be ashamed of himself,” Brendan Cox said.

This is not the first time that Trump has used the power of his Twitter following to act as a megaphone for extreme racist and Islamophobic activists. In January 2016, just as the presidential primary season was getting into gear, he retweeted a white supremacist with the handle WhiteGenocideTM.

The president was also widely criticized for his comments after the violence involving racist extremists in Charlottesville in August in which an anti-fascist protester was killed when Trump implied moral equivalence between the white supremacists and those rallying against them.

But in Beirich’s opinion, to tweet three videos from a leading British purveyor of extremism took the potential damage inflicted by Trump’s social media behavior up a notch. “He is dealing with truly frightening people who have been prosecuted for hate crimes, giving them a platform,” she said.

TV targets

It didn’t stop there. By 6.49am, only 20 minutes after dawn, Trump had turned his invective on one of his favourite punchbags, CNN. The president’s splurge of criticism of the cable network for “fake news” is now a familiar theme, but by threatening to issue a boycott he took his war on the established media and the first amendment to a new level.

And they kept coming. In a quickfire stream of tweets, he called for an investigation into the history of NBC boss Andy Lack, demanded the sacking of MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin, and revived an old conspiracy theory against Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Conspiracy theory

Trump invoked what he called the “‘unsolved mystery’ that took place in Florida years ago” to demand the dismissal of Scarborough, who began as a sympathetic interlocutor of the Republican candidate during the 2016 campaign but has since renounced his party and become a leading detractor. The “mystery” in question relates to the sudden death in 2001 of Lori Klausutis, an aide to Scarborough at a time when he was a Republican member of Congress from Florida.

Contrary to the president’s claim, the puzzle was settled to the satisfaction of all but the most dedicated conspiracy theorists in August that year. The medical examiner found that Klausutis had fainted from an abnormal heart rhythm and hit her head while falling, causing her death.

North Korea

After all that, it only remained for the US president to have an early morning phone conversation with the Chinese president, Xi Jingping, over the threat to world peace posed by the latest North Korean missile launch. “This situation will be handled!” Trump tweeted at 9.40am, spreading a comforting glow of confidence in his judgment and statesmanlike abilities around the globe.

“Looks like I picked a good day to stop responding to Trump’s bizarre tweets,” was Scarborough’s summation of an exhausting start to the day. Then the TV host added a thought that he has expressed before but may now be growing in currency: “He is not well.”