Trump agreed to delete his 'white power' tweet only after the GOP's sole Black senator called the video 'indefensible,' report says

• Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black GOP senator, helped persuade President Donald Trump to delete a tweet in which a supporter of his chanted "white power," The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
• Scott called the video, which showed members of a retirement community in Florida arguing over the president, "indefensible."
• It took Trump three hours to delete the offensive post.
• The White House said the president watched the video before he shared it with his more than 82 million followers but didn't hear the racist phrase.

It took President Donald Trump several hours to agree to delete his Sunday-morning tweet featuring a video in which a supporter of his chanted "white power," The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The president decided to take down his offensive message, in which he praised his supporters in the video, only after the Republican Party's sole Black senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, publicly called the tweet "indefensible," The Post said.

"There's no question: He should not have retweeted it and he should just take it down," Scott told CNN in an interview Sunday morning. "If you watch the entire video — you can't play it because it was so profanity-laced — the entire thing was offensive. Certainly the comment about the 'white power' was offensive."

He added: "We can play politics with it or we can't. I'm not going to. I think it's indefensible — we should take it down. That's what I think."

In another Sunday interview, Scott told CBS News the video of Trump's supporters and and opponents arguing in a Florida retirement community was "terrible."

Trump had been playing golf for several hours at his club in Virginia on Sunday while his aides attempted to get in touch with him and his aide Dan Scavino to discuss deleting the video, NBC News reported Monday.

The president's tweet was removed at about 11 a.m. Sunday — three hours after he had posted it.

Judd Deere, a White House representative, said Trump had not heard the man yelling "white power" before he shared the video with his more than 82 million followers. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany later said that the president watched the video before he tweeted it but said he didn't hear the chant, which a man yelled twice before another man repeated it.

Neither the White House nor the president apologized for sharing the video or condemned its contents.