President Donald Trump on Sunday retweeted an animated GIF showing him hitting a golf ball at Hillary Clinton, knocking her to the ground as she boards a plane. He did this just moments after using Twitter to mock Kim Jong Un, the nuclear-possessing dictator of North Korea, as “Rocket Man.”
They were two of several tweets Trump sent on Sunday morning, six of which were retweets of presumed fans. The White House daily guidance said the president had nothing on his schedule until 4 pm, when he would depart his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
The president often gets into hot water for retweeting accounts that have previously made offensive commentary online. And despite Chief of Staff John Kelly’s attempts to curtail Trump’s tweeting, it appears as if the president has access to his phone, and weekend morning time to kill.
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Sunday morning’s Clinton GIF came from an account called @fuctupmind, which happens to boast former national security adviser Michael Flynn as a follower. The account’s description is just a series of hashtags including “#SethRich”—the former DNC staffer whose murder has become fodder for a conspiracy theory on the far-right—who is an intense focus of the content. Despite the Washington D.C. police having long said that Rich’s death was the result of a botched robbery, there are numerous tweets in which it’s suggested that Clinton was responsible for murdering him.
Clinton herself has said that Trump normalized and often encouraged misogynistic and violent imagery during the campaign.
In November of last year, the @fuctupmind account posted an anti-Semitic message which read in part: “Please get rid of the Hasidic Jews.” That tweet was deleted later Sunday.
Trump has tweeted controversial animations before to the delight of many of his supporters. In July, he was accused of inciting violence against journalists when he tweeted out a video of himself at a WWE wrestling show kicking and punching a man who had the CNN logo superimposed on his face. At the time, Trump’s aides laughed it off, suggesting the president was just joking around.
Last month, he retweeted and deleted an image that appeared to depict a train running over a person with the CNN logo superimposed on their face.
On Sunday morning, four of Trump’s other retweets came from an account called Trumpism 5.0 (@Team_Trump45) whose avatar is a picture of actor Mark Wahlberg. They included an image of a train ploughing through snow-covered tracks with a “Make America Great Again” hat on, and an electoral map showing Trump winning every state in 2020 with the words “Keep it up Libs.”
The president’s personal account has previously shown some appreciation for Trumpism 5.0, whose tweets are primarily comprised of memes tweeted directly at @realdonaldtrump. In early September, Trump retweeted an image from the account that showed the new cover of Hillary Clinton’s book “What Happened,” juxtaposed with an image of Trump smiling with the words, “I Happened.”
The third account that the president retweeted on Sunday appears to be largely a pro-Lana Del Ray user, whose banner image is the pop singer. “Only true Americans can see that president Trump is making America great,” user lana del fenty wrote. “He's the only person who can! Haters are jealous of his success.”
