President Trump retweeted a video Sunday morning that included one of his supporters at the sprawling Florida retirement community The Villages shouting "white power" while driving a golf cart. He left up the tweet, which he captioned: "Thank you to the great people of The Villages," for more than three hours before he deleted it. During those three hours, a "five-alarm fire" was raging at the White House as aides tried to reach Trump to urge him to take down the tweet, two White House officials tell NBC News. They couldn't reach him, the officials said, because "the president was at his golf club in Virginia and had put his phone down."
The senior advisers who eventually reached Trump included White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Jared Kushner, The Washington Post reports, and Trump finally gave the go-ahead to delete the tweet because he was "moved, in large part, by the public calls from Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate's only black Republican, to do just that." Scott had called the tweet "indefensible" on CNN.
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