Donald Trump suggests Nascar's Confederate flag ban lowered TV ratings

The White House had to deny claims that Donald Trump supported the flying of the Confederate flag after the US president appeared to criticise Nascar's decision to ban it from races.

Mr Trump sparked the row by tweeting about a black Nascar racer who founded a noose in his garage after successfully pushing for the franchise to stop allowing people to wave the flag in the crowd.

The Confederacy was the group of southern states that broke away from the Union, triggering the civil war in the 1860s. They supported the continuation of slavery in America.

The discovery of the noose in the garage of Bubba Wallace triggered an outpouring of support from fellow drivers amid fears it was a racist threat of violence after the Confederate flag ban was announced.

Yet the FBI later found that the noose had been in that garage since 2019, indicating that it was not placed there as a message to Mr Wallace.

On Monday Mr Trump asked in a tweet if Mr Wallace to "apologised" over the incident, adding "that & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!"

The president's suggestion that Nascar's ban of the Confederate flag - the image of a group which broke away from the United States and defended slavery - had resulted in bad TV ratings was taken as criticism of the decision.

Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, was repeatedly asked about the tweet at a press briefing, pushed on whether the US president was effectively supporting the flying of the Confederate flag.

Ms McEnany said she had spoken to the president and that the message was not meant as a judgement "one way or the other" about whether Nascar should have banned the flying of the flag.

Mr Trump's full tweet had read:

Ms McEnany  said: "The whole point of the tweet was to note the incident, the alleged hate crime that, in fact, was not a hate crime.

"At the very end, the ban on the flag was mentioned the broader context of the fact that he rejects this notion that somehow NASCAR men and women who go to the sporting events are racist when in fact, as it turns out, what we saw with the FBI report and the alleged incident of hate crime, it was a complete indictment of the media's rush to judgment once again, calling this a hate crime when the FBI completely dismissed that."

It follows weeks in which Mr Trump has come out strongly against those seeking to down statues of old Confederate generals and refused to rename US army bases named after those men.

Over the weekend Mr Trump doubled down on the so-called culture wars, vowing to make a new park filled with statues to US heroes and hitting out at "cancel culture" and how it was indoctrinating US children.

CNN have reported that senior Pentagon chiefs were considering banning the flying of Confederate flags at all US military bases.

The move, if adopted as formal policy, could lead to a clash between senior US military and the president over Confederate iconography at US bases.

Mr Wallace later tweeted “always deal with the hate being thrown at you with LOVE!” , adding in reference to Mr Trump: “Even when it’s HATE from the POTUS.”