- The Washington Times - Monday, July 6, 2020

NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace responded to President Trump’s jab Monday by urging his social media followers to ignore “haters.”

“Always deal with the hate being thrown at you with LOVE!” Mr. Wallace tweeted. “Love should come naturally as people are TAUGHT to hate. Even when its HATE from the POTUS…Love wins.”

In a tweet, Mr. Trump slammed Mr. Wallace, the sole black NASCAR driver, and called on him to apologize for for complaining about a hate crime when his team found a rope shaped like a noose in his garage bay. The FBI determined that there was no hate crime; the rope-pull on a garage door had been there since at least October, when Mr. Wallace’s team wasn’t using that particular garage bay.

NASCAR president Steve Phelps explained in a press conference last month that it was a team member who noticed the rope and officials decided to open an investigation before notifying Mr. Wallace.

The president tweeted that NASCAR ratings have gone down since the “hoax” over the noose, and since Mr. Wallace successfully led a move to ban the Confederate flag from NASCAR events.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president “was not taking a position [on the Confederate flag] one way or the other.”

“There was no hate crime, the FBI concluded that, [and] President Trump was merely saying Mr. Wallace should agree with that,” she said. “There was no hate crime here and we should all be grateful for that. Most Americans are great, hard-working people.”

She said the president “wants no part in ’cancel culture’” and he’s appalled by the media’s “rush to judgment” in cases of alleged racism.

“He rejects this notion that somehow NASCAR men and women who go to these sporting events are racist,” she said.

• Gabriella Muñoz can be reached at gmunoz@washingtontimes.com.

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