Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump landed in hot water for a questionable, two-year-old tweet about 9/11 that he has since deleted, stirring up even more controversy.
“I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th,” read the 2013 tweet, which was removed Friday morning, though not before it was saved via screenshot and widely circulated on Twitter.
While the original tweet was deleted, a manual retweet from later that day remains live.
Social media went wild, calling the expunged post “classless,” “weird” and “a meta-retweet.”
It wasn’t just liberals and Trump “haters” who decried the language Trump used. Even noted neocon Bill Kristol expressed his disgust with the dated tweet.
"The tweet is from several years ago," Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told Politico by way of an explanation.
Blue Nation Review pointed out that Trump “never deletes” his tweets, “no matter how dumb they are. Deleting an old tweet is admitting to a mistake, and Donald J. Trump does not admit to mistakes." (emphasis original)
“So his decision to delete this particular tweet, on this particular day, is a truly momentous occasion. Trump, for just a moment, realized he’s kind of a prick,” Blue Nation Review concluded.
The billionaire businessman-cum-politician has a history of dedicating holiday tweets to “the haters and the losers.”
“Loser” is a favorite insult of his ‒ along with “idiot” and “lightweight” ‒ lobbed at those he is vying against in the crowded GOP field, as well as to anyone who dares offend him.
It’s also not the first time Trump has gotten in hot water over a tweet. In mid-July, the billionaire’s campaign office tweeted a photo of the candidate’s face, the White House and.... some Nazi soldiers in the background. Trump blamed a “young intern.”
Just days before, he got into a spat on Twitter with notorious escaped Mexican cartel boss Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman.
Trump waited until late morning ‒ 11:20 ET ‒ to tweet about the 14th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.