It’s hard — scratch that, impossible — to keep track of all of Donald Trump’s offensive tweets. But yesterday’s, featuring an image of Hillary Clinton next to a Star of David with the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” superimposed over a pile of money, was worthy of his Hall of Infamy.
Not an accident.Although the tweet was deleted about two hours later after the natural outrage, it was natural to wonder what on earth his team was thinking. Was it an in-house graphic gone bad? Was the Star of David an accidental anti-Semitic reference rather than an intentional one?
Well, now we know:
On Sunday, Mic discovered that Donald Trump's Twitter wasn't the first place the meme appeared. The image was previously featured on /pol/ — an Internet message board for the alt-right, a digital movement of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and white supremacists newly emboldened by the success of Donald Trump's rhetoric — as early as June 22, 2016, over a week before Donald Trump's team tweeted it.
It’s fair to conclude that the anti-Semitism was intentional on the part of the image creator. Especially when considering the file name:
Of note is the file name of the photo, HillHistory.jpg, potentially a nod to the Neo-Nazi code for "HH," or "Heil Hitler," which the alt-right is fond of hiding in plain sight.
So: no in-house editing error, no accident, but a deliberately anti-Semitic image.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that whoever sent this out, whether that was Trump himself or some intern, didn’t see the dog whistle. But that’s hardly a defense. Someone browsed that neo-Nazi web site, thought it was a cute image, and uploaded it for eventual use by the official campaign. As the Mic.com article points out, this has happened before:
Last November, Trump previously retweeted a meme perpetuating the racist lie explicitly that black people committed more violent crimes against white people than any other race. That was found to have originated from the alt-right internet as well.
Whether or not Donald Trump is personally sympathetic to neo-Nazis, his campaign has again provided a vehicle for their propaganda to reach a mainstream audience. Shameful.