DEMS/DONALD JR/RACISM/SOCIAL MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared another person’s tweet with his millions of followers during the Democratic debate on Thursday [6-27-19] that falsely claimed Senator Kamala Harris was not black enough to be discussing the plight of black Americans. ‘Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves,’ Ali Alexander, a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities, wrote on Twitter. ‘She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.’ Mr. Trump, a valuable Republican surrogate as his father faces a bruising 2020 race, posted the tweet of unverified information, then asked his more than three million followers: ‘Is this true? Wow.’ By the end of the night, Mr. Trump had deleted his message, and by Friday, a spokesman said it had all been a misunderstanding…But by then, the original message, questioning the background of a presidential candidate who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, had already spread far and wide. For people like Mr. Alexander — an alt-right fringe figure who has also gone by the name Ali Akbar — the entire point of commenting was to go viral and counteract any progress made by a Democrat like Ms. Harris.”
–Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman, “Donald Trump Jr. Shares, Then Deletes, a Tweet Questioning Kamala Harris’s Race,” The New York Times online, June 28, 2019