Husband of British parliamentarian killed by a ‘Britain First’ sympathizer says he’s ‘shocked’ by Trump’s retweets

Brendan Cox, the husband of a British parliamentarian who was murdered by a reported sympathizer of the British far-right group, Britain First, responded to President Donald Trump’s social-media interactions with the leader of that group Tuesday night.

“I think we probably got used to a degree of absurdity, of outrageous retweets and tweets from the president, but I think this felt like it was a different order,” Cox told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night.

“Here he was retweeting a felon, somebody who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment of an organization that is a hate-driven organization on the extreme fringes of the far, far right of British politics.”

“This is like the president retweeting the Ku Klux Klan,” Cox said.

Trump earlier on Tuesday shared a string of anti-Muslim videos embedded in tweets from the far-right activist Jayda Fransen. The authenticity of those videos was called into question during a White House press conference on Tuesday afternoon, but press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to acknowledge doubts about their veracity.

Cox spoke to Trump’s temperament in his interview with CNN Tuesday night: “This president has become a purveyor of hate and it’s time we all said enough is enough and we won’t tolerate that no matter what our political disagreements.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May scolded Trump over his retweets, and Trump shot back in a familiar way, using recent terror attacks in that part of the world to snap at May and the UK, one of America’s oldest and most steadfast allies.

Comments

comments