White House: It doesn't matter if anti-Muslim videos are real because 'the threat is real'
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, responded to President Donald Trump's promoting anti-Muslim videos on Twitter on Wednesday.
"Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," she told reporters. "His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security."
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said it didn't matter whether the anti-Muslim videos President Donald Trump retweeted on Wednesday morning were real.
"Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," Sanders told reporters Wednesday, according to a CBS News reporter. "His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security."
Trump's early-morning retweets included three videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the ultranationalist far-right group Britain First who has previously been charged with "religious aggravated harassment" in the UK, The New York Times reported. The videos included footage portraying Muslims committing violent acts.
Social media reacts to Trump's anti-Muslim retweets:
She tweeted alongside the first video, "Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!" Another was titled "Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary." A third was titled "Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death."
The first video was false — authorities later found that the "Muslim migrant" shown assaulting the Dutch person was neither Muslim nor a migrant, The Mirror reported, citing two Dutch websites.
Britain First often peddles anti-Muslim conspiracies.
Trump's retweets were widely condemned by the likes of British Prime Minister Theresa May, the former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and even the far-right conspiracy theorist Paul Joesph Watson of Infowars.
"Yeah, someone might want to tell whoever is running Trump's Twitter account this morning that retweeting Britain First is not great optics," Watson tweeted.
Piers Morgan, a British television host who formerly competed on Trump's reality show "Celebrity Apprentice" and is often sympathetic to him and his policies, also blasted the president's decision to retweet the Britain First videos.
"What the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists?" Morgan tweeted. "Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets."
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