Donald Trump's Latest White-Supremacist Blunder Isn't His First
Donald Trump on Monday dismissed accusations that an image of Hillary Clinton that he tweeted and deleted over the weekend was anti-Semitic.
The tweet in question featured a photo of Clinton on a backdrop of $100 bills next to a six-sided star that read "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever." It was later discovered by the newsite Mic that the image had originally been posted to a pro-Trump neo-Nazi message board late last month.
Trump deleted the tweet and later shared an edited version of the graphic in which a circle replaced the star. But the presumptive GOP nominee defended the image on Monday in another tweet that read: "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!"
It's not the first time Trump's campaign has shared a meme with neo-Nazi roots. In November 2015, he was branded racist for tweeting and deleting a graphic that falsely claimed that black people commit most murders in the U.S.
It was ultimately revealed that the graphic originated from a neo-Nazi website. Trump would later claim that he shouldn't be held responsible because he didn't endorse the graphic. "Am I going to check every statistic? I get millions and millions of people @realdonaldtrump," Trump told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly at the time. "All it was is a retweet. It wasn't from me."
And in February 2016, Trump came under fire for failing to immediately denounce an endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. He blamed this blunder on a "bad earpiece," claiming he hadn't heard Jake Tapper ask him whether he would disavow Duke.
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And then there was the time he selected a white nationalist leader as a delegate in California.
These are just a few of the incidents in which Trump has linked himself directly or indirectly to white supremacist groups.
"We've been alarmed that Mr. Trump hasn't spoken out vociferously against these anti-Semites and racists and misogynists who continue to support him," said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). "It's been outrageous to see him retweeting and now sourcing material from the website and other online resources from this crowd."
Adds Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Trump support in the white-supremacist world is unprecedented. The typical white-supremacist opinion of politicians is 'a pox on both their houses.' No one deserves their trust. But in Trump, they've found a champion."
