Amid the Black Lives Matter protests and escalating tensions throughout the U.S. this week, a 2013 tweet where Donald Trump quoted a racial slur has since resurfaced. The then-businessman and reality TV star used an old and long-defunct Twitter function, where quoting another person's tweet within your retweet simply showed it in quotes, so at first glance, it looks to some as if the president had tweeted the N-word. Many people were outraged by the post.
Back in 2013, Trump was in a Twitter dispute with a few users now absent from the website about the use of the N-word by non-African-American people. After quoting their tweet, Trump wrote: "Why does Paula D get destroyed and you can use the 'N' word so freely, ass—?" this is not the first time this particular tweet has resurfaced, but once against it caused many people to do a double take, wondering if the president had just posted a slur.
These days, a quote-retweet creates a smaller text block within the main tweet, clearly denoting which user said what. It also takes up less of the user's character count to quote another tweet within theirs. Some users were not even on Twitter before this feature was changed, so they were not familiar with what they were seeing.
Others figured it out quickly, yet they were still put off. They thought that Trump should have thought more carefully about what he was doing when he quoted this post, and they thought that having done so should have disqualified him from the presidency in 2016.
Of course, many people related this tweet to this week's Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the country, where Americans protested police violence, systemic racism and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. So far, Trump has not responded to the outrage over his old tweet. Here's a breakdown of what Twitter is saying about it this weekend.