Experts: Trump has ‘empowered extremism’

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Europe

‍By CGTN's The Point

“That is ridiculous. That is like someone who works for Adolf Hitler saying the movies showing Jews aren’t true, but the threat is real,” said Rick Dunham, former White House correspondent for Business Week, citing Fascism as a metaphor for White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to President Donald Trump’s retweeting of three unverified anti-Muslim videos.

When pressed by reporters outside the White House, Sanders responded as saying “whether it's a real video, the threat is real.”

Trump retweeted the videos from a prominent member of a far-right British group called Britain First.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May responded by saying Trump’s move was “the wrong thing to do”, to which Trump advised her to "focus on destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom”.

“You have to deal directly with the content he retweeted, which one of them is known to be false,” Dunham said.

Current affairs commentator Victor Gao believed exercising leadership and representing the office of the President through tweets is the wrong thing to do.

“It is very much spontaneous, without deep thinking, without being checked and verified by advisors or government departments,” he said.

He said Islam is a dignified religion and deserves its place in the world today.

“There are people who practice terrorism, sometimes under the guise of Islam,” he pointed out, but people have to make a distinction between what Islam represents and what terrorists do in its name.

“By retweeting, President Donald Trump is confusing the black and white, the right and wrong,” he said.

Responding to the question of whether fundamentalism is surfacing in US society, Dunham said no. But he did believe that Donald Trump has empowered and emboldened extremism and racism in the United States.

“People who were white supremacist, who were hate group leaders, who had been sort of in their caves, now all of a sudden, they are using social media, just like Donald Trump. They are getting more publicity. It is a scary moment for American democracy, because you have all of these injected in a world of free speech,” he explained.

Gao also worried about the split within the Western world, saying that Trump has managed to significantly erode and damage the US’s global leadership role in just 10 months in office.

Victor Gao, current affairs commentator. /CGTN screenshot

“He has become more and more discredited, not only by people in developing countries but more alarmingly by leaders and government agencies in the Western developed countries," Gao said.

"If Western leaders find it more and more difficult to really engage with President Trump on the political level, even on the ideological level, then the US will become more and more distanced away on the global stage by Western countries. This is alarming and this is dangerous. This will mean that the world will become more and more uncertain.”

The Point with Liu Xin is a 30-minute current affairs program on CGTN. It airs weekdays at 9.30 p.m. BJT (1330GMT), with rebroadcasts at 5.30 a.m. (2130GMT) and 10.30 a.m. (0230GMT).

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