President Donald Trump suggested that the noose that NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace found was a ‘hoax’ on Monday.
Wallace, the only Black driver for NASCAR, found what appeared to be a noose in the Talladega Superspeedway garage in Lincoln, Alabama. It came less than two weeks after the league issued a ban on Confederate flags and as the Black Lives Matter protests exploded across America.
After Wallace released a statement, far-right trolls called the incident a hoax. Now, the president is chiming in.
“Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX? That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!” Trump tweeted.
The capitalized ‘Flag’ Trump refers to in his tweet is the Confederate flag.
Trump is among many in the far-right to undermine Wallace. Trolls compared Wallace to actor Jussie Smollett, who set up a hate crime against himself in 2019.
The FBI also sided against Wallace and determined the incident was not a hate crime. NASCAR shared the findings on its Twitter page.
“The FBI report concludes, and photographic evidence confirms, that the garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose had been positioned there since as early as last fall,” NASCAR tweeted.
Wallace maintains that the rope was a noose.
“Whether someone tied it in 2019 … It wasn’t directed at me,” Wallace told CNN in an interview, “but it was a noose.”
Wallace has yet to respond to Trump’s tweet.
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*First Published: Jul 6, 2020, 12:30 pm
Libby Cohen
Libby Cohen is a third-year University of Texas student originally from New Jersey. She has written for ORANGE Magazine, the Daily Texan, and most recently interned for 1010 WINS in NYC. She’s now back in Austin writing for the Texas Standard and the Daily Dot.
Source : https://www.dailydot.com/debug/trump-tweet-nascar-hoax/