Just days after a car attack killed a woman in Virginia, President Donald Trump blasted out an image to his 35 million followers showing a train hitting a man.
The president was "in the middle of his usual tweetstorm" Tuesday morning, the Washington Post reported, when he retweeted the image. It had the logo of CNN over the man's face and the caption "Fake news can't stop the Trump train." Trump has framed the cable news network as one of his major "enemies."
He quickly removed the retweet, but not before journalists captured screenshots:
Trump RT'd this pic showing a CNN journalist hit by a train days after a white nationalist ran his car into activists, killed Heather Heyer. pic.twitter.com/tWjdoE70AS
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 15, 2017
It wasn't the first time the president tweeted an image of violence against CNN: Earlier this summer, he posted a 28-second video of a WWE broadcast edited to show Trump beating up a man with a CNN logo on his face.
Trump blamed "many sides" for Saturday's violence and chaos in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists gathered for a rally. But he didn't explicitly call out the extremist groups until Monday. Kenneth Frazier of Merck, one of America's most prominent black CEOs, quit Trump's manufacturing council over that delay.
Heather Heyer, 32, was killed and 19 others were hurt when a driver rammed his car into people protesting against the rally.
The suspect, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, espoused Nazi ideology in high school, a former teacher and classmates said. Fields grew up in Northern Kentucky but recently moved to the Toledo, Ohio area. He is being held without bail in Virginia on a count of second-degree murder, among other charges.
Members of Trump's administration have labeled the attack an act of terror, and a federal civil rights investigation is underway.
Police are looking into three other Ohio men accused on social media of attending and causing violence at the event.
