President Donald Trump’s Saturday morning started like so many of his mornings do: with a very early Twitter tirade. The president praised lockdown protesters harassing a local TV reporter, retweeted a cartoon depicting Rep. Adam Schiff as the Joker, and lauded a video of a right-wing columnist who was shunned by conservatives for supporting a Holocaust denier.
In a spree of at least 28 tweets starting Saturday morning, Trump retweeted the video of Michelle Malkin, a former Fox News contributor who has since aligned herself with the most virulent corners of the far-right. In the video, Malkin very loudly complained about conservatives being silenced. She decried the decline of “safe spaces” for conservatives, repeating a familiar right-wing claim that social media companies unfairly censor conservative views.
Trump retweeted and supported Malkin’s message, writing: “The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events. Thank you Michelle!”
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The video—which appears to have since been deleted—was produced by America First, an internet show founded by “Unite the Right” marcher and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has previously claimed that segregation was “better” for everyone and declared it is “time to kill the globalists.” He also defended the man who killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, saying that—based on the shooter’s anti-immigrant, white nationalist manifesto—the shooting was “an act of desperation.”
Malkin has called Fuentes “one of the New Right leaders,” and—at an event put on by the conservative youth group Young America’s Foundation—she said of “America-firsters” like Fuentes: “If I was your mom, I’d be proud as hell.”
Malkin eventually lost her speaking gigs with the Young America’s Foundation over her vocal support for Fuentes, but she has only doubled down from there. At a conference hosted by Fuentes and Patrick Casey, the head of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa, she claimed it was not anti-Semitic to question the number of people who died in World War II.
Malkin has even started referring to herself as a “mommy” to these fringe-right figures, and talked about “passing the torch” to “kids who do video from their basement.”
“I feel very confident that you, the Light Brigade, the America First Brigade, are well positioned to do what so few other grassroots revolts and rebellions have succeeded in doing,” she said at the Fuentes-organized event. “I believe in you. I honor your charge. I honor your mission.”
Later in the morning, Trump retweeted a video from News 12 Long Island reporter Kevin Vesey that showed anti-lockdown protesters berating the journalist as a “hack,” “disgusting,” and “the enemy of the people.” The reporter had previously said that the protesters followed and harassed him, refusing to keep six feet of distance, throughout the morning he spent trying to report on their protest.
“People can’t get enough of this,” the president tweeted of the protesters. “Great people!”
