WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump appeared Tuesday to have mistakenly retweeted a message from one of his critics saying "he's a fascist," deleting his retweet after about five minutes -- but not before the message was sent to his 35 million followers.
Trump seems to have been trying to draw attention to a Fox & Friends article on a possible presidential pardon for former Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, who was convicted of a crime for ignoring a U.S. court order to stop traffic patrols that targeted immigrants.
A Twitter handle identified as "MikeHolden42" tweeted a reply to the Fox & Friends article as well as to Trump's Twitter handle, "He's a fascist, so not unusual." The user suggested in subsequent tweets that he was calling Trump a fascist, not Arpaio.
Trump retweeted the message to his followers, triggering an avalanche of replies. MikeHolden42 responded: "I'm announcing my retirement from Twitter. I'll never top this RT," referring to Trump's retweet. He later updated his description on Twitter as "Officially Endorsed by the President of the United States. I wish that were a good thing."
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Also Tuesday, Trump shared on Twitter a cartoon of a train running over a person with a CNN logo covering the person's head, three days after a protester died after being hit by a car in Charlottesville, Va. Trump deleted his retweet minutes later.
Trump has been under fire for how he has publicly addressed bloody demonstrations by white nationalists over the weekend. Promoting a cartoon of a person being run over by a train drew backlash for appearing to belittle the attack by a driver who ran into a crowd of counterprotesters, leaving a 32-year-old woman dead and 19 others injured on Saturday.
A White House official said early Tuesday that the tweet of the train was posted inadvertently and was deleted as soon as it was noticed.
Trump and his associates have long been critical of CNN. On Tuesday, the president's re-election committee issued a statement criticizing CNN for what the committee described as censorship because the news network did not air an advertisement that was released Sunday.
The ad briefly shows faces of television journalists, including several from CNN, with the words "attacking our president," and a voice-over at the end says "the president's enemies" as their faces reappear.
A network spokesman said CNN would have accepted the ad if the reporters and anchors had been removed.
In July, Trump posted a video on his Twitter account portraying him wrestling and punching a figure whose head had been replaced by the CNN logo.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press; by Eileen Sullivan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; and by David Nakamura and Brian Murphy of The Washington Post.
A Section on 08/16/2017