Trump gestures 'white power' taking AOC's name, calls Rashida Tlaib 'crazed lunatic' and 'vicious'
At the Turning Point USA's teen student summit in Washington on Monday, President Donald Trump made a hand gesture often associated with white supremacy in the modern times while talking about Rep. Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez (D-MN), also known as AOC.
The moment that was edited and tweeted out by Vox reporter Aaron Rupar was when the POTUS began talking about AOC after calling Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) a "crazed lunatic." "We have bad people, we have sick people. I watched this morning this Tlaib... There is no way she stands for the values of Michigan. But I watched her this morning. She is vicious. She's like a crazed lunatic. This before she got into Congress. Who elected her? She's screaming like a total lunatic at one of our rallies... This is what we are up against," Trump said at the event, which was cheered by the crowd.
After slamming Tlaib, he moved onto AOC. "The Democrats are forced to embrace her. I call it AOC plus three. Not that AOC is a bargain, I mean look, she's no bargain... I'll tell you all about AOC. I got more about AOC," the president said.
In the very next second, Trump made a hand gesture, where the tips of his thumb touched index finger making a round shape while the other fingers were outstretched, as he said the letters "AOC."
Although most people tend to associate the particular hand gesture with "okay," others have been wary about using the symbol as it was co-opted by a 4chan hoax, where members of the English-language imageboard website falsely promoted it to mean a hate symbol. They claimed that the gesture represented the letters "wp", or "white power". The symbol became so successful that it soon became a popular trolling method and right-leaning individuals soon started posting photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
Marine Le Pen, president of the French National Rally political party, was forced to disavow the same gesture after she made it while posing for a selfie with the far-right Estonian lawmaker Ruuben Kaalep. "It isn’t a white supremacist gesture, it’s a gesture that means ‘O.K.'" she said later, Indy100 reported.
Rupar's edited video where Trump was caught making the gesture was titled, "Trump makes a hand gesture while saying AOC's name," which drew a number of reactions from a number of eminent personalities on Twitter:
