Virginia GOP candidate won Trump’s endorsement with racist ad on Hannity

Donald Trump’s spontaneous intervention into the Virginia gubernatorial election Friday morning with a racist tweet only ended up complicating things for GOP candidate Ed Gillespie, who was trying to keep his own brand separate and distinct from Trump.

Democratic candidate Ralph Northam responded to Trump’s tweet by fundraising off of it. And the whole incident is even more embarrassing given the reason why Trump leapt on Twitter in the first place.

For the past few weeks, Gillespie has been running a series of racist ads depicting heavily tattooed Hispanic gang members eager to murder and rape white people. The ads attack Northam for refusing to vote for a bill banning sanctuary cities, even though there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia and crime data shows such cities are actually safer.

Trump, as it turns out, tweeted his ostensible thoughts — which attacks Northam on exactly the same issue — just eleven minutes after one of these ads aired in a commercial break during Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News.

Just noticed this —

Racist Gillespie ad runs at 9:47 during Fox News’ Hannity Trump’s lying and racist tweet comes almost immediately after pic.twitter.com/tFf6oikC08 — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) October 6, 2017

Trump making official decisions based on what he sees on television is galling, but unfortunately, it’s also not new.

Randomly tweeting about the last thing he saw on TV is a habit of his; he once relied on a Tucker Carlson segment to set a sweeping, bigoted policy restricting who could serve in the military.

By contrast, Trump is known to spurn conventional presidential sources of information, like his daily memos, unless they mention his name a lot.

America needs a president who will think through his choices and not act on any random thought that pops into his head, much less thoughts put into his head by watching a racist commercial on Fox News. SaveSave

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