While Donald Trump is taking and tweeting memes that originate on white supremacist websites and is being called a racist by at least one other presidential candidate, the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign is here to tell you that Trump didn’t mean to be anti-Semitic in the latest social media snafu that’s gotten him into trouble.
“We corrected it. There was never any intention of any anti-Semitism,” Trump campaign adviser Ed Brookover told CNN on Monday. “Mr. Trump has consistently and loudly denounced the white supremacist groups.”
Yet somehow Trump keeps managing to retweet white supremacist accounts, and then subsequently blame the “dishonest media” for pointing it out to the masses.
Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff’s Star, or plain star!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2016
And while it could be argued effectively that Trump’s star wasn’t actually the Star of David, a major symbol of the Jewish people, Mic reported that the photo of Hillary Clinton and the star originally appeared on an 8chan forum that’s popular with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists on June 22.
Here was Trump’s original tweet.
Donald Trump/Twitter via Wayback Machine
Soon after—but not that soon after—Trump deleted his original tweet and amended the star with a poorly-edited circle that barely covered its points.
https://twitter.com/katz/status/749267575406727168
https://twitter.com/BenMakesTV/status/749264044536791040
Since then, Trump and his campaign have defended themselves from the charges of anti-Semitism. As for the person who tweeted the original image? Brookover said he doesn’t think the person responsible would be fired by the campaign.
“These memes float around the internet,” Brookover said. “Not every six-sided star is a Star of David. There is no intent here at all. We corrected this tweet and have moved on.”
H/T The Hill
