President Donald Trump retweeted a video of an interview in which conservative activist Candace Owens blasted George Floyd’s character. In the interview with Glenn Beck, Owens said that it “sickens” her that Floyd “has been held up as a martyr.” In the tweet of the interview that Beck shared, the radio host said that whatever Floyd did doesn’t matter because the “officer should have never treated him like that and killed him!” But in the interview Beck questioned Floyd’s past. “This is a guy with a very long record and a very long criminal record,” Beck said.
Beck asked Owens whether Floyd is “the symbol of black America today.” Owens responded affirmatively, saying that he is “a symbol of black America today” and the “broken culture” that no one wants to talk about. “The fact that he has been held up as a martyr sickens me. George Floyd was not a good person. I don’t care who wants to spin that,” Owens said.
Trump’s retweet of the video came hours after he had declared that it was a “great day” for Floyd. “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country,” Trump said as he celebrated a surprisingly strong jobs report. “This is a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality.”
The retweet of Beck’s interview with Owens came on a day in which the president broke his Twitter record as he posted 200 tweets and retweets in one 24-hour period. If the tweets had been evenly spaced out throughout the day, it would have meant the commander in chief sent a tweet or a retweet once every seven minutes and 12 seconds. His previous all-time posting record was on Jan. 5, 2015, when he sent out 161 tweets, followed by Jan. 22, when he sent out 142 Twitter posts at the height of the Senate impeachment trial, according to Factbase. In terms of original tweets, Trump sent out 37 on Friday, meaning he came just shy of breaking the record he had set on Thursday with 42. All this Twitter activity also helped Trump break his weekly record.
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