In an interview posted yesterday, Donald Trump Jr., the son and campaign surrogate of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, said that a tweet sent by his father’s Twitter account widely viewed as anti-Semitic was “a mistake from an IT guy” and defended his father against charges of anti-Semitism.
“I’ve never seen anything so disgusting in your life,” he told radio host John Fredericks, later adding that when “the left” tries to “throw out the ‘racism card’ or the ‘anti-Semite card’” it does “a major disservice to the people who are actually afflicted by that plight.”
Trump Jr. said that his father couldn’t possibly be anti-Semitic because he has Jewish friends, family members and coworkers: “You couldn’t be in business in New York City for forty years doing the things that we’ve done if you’ve even had a notion of this.”
“It’s about as stupid as saying that I’m racist against white people,” he said. “It doesn’t get any dumber.”
His father, however, has defended the tweet.
Trump has repeatedly said that the image, which blasted Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” by featuring what appeared to be a Star of David over a pile of money, should never have been deleted — his campaign removed the image and sent a new one putting a circle over the star — and even brought up a sticker book from the movie “Frozen” to defend the image.
The image featuring a star originated on a racist, anti-Semitic message board popular with “neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white supremacists” that was later posted on Twitter by a racist user. As PolitiFact notes, this isn’t the first time Trump tweeted images from racist, anti-Semitic users:
Trump twice retweeted from the feed of the Twitter account @WhiteGenocideTM, which claims to be located in “Jewmerica” and regularly posts anti-Semitic material, and once from the now-defunct account @cheesedbrit, which had an account page that featured Swastika art and said in part, “we Should have listened to the Austrian chap with the little moustache” — that is, Adolf Hitler. And Trump also attracted criticism when he initially said he didn’t know who former KKK leader David Duke was.
Trump Jr. once tweeted an image from a white nationalist, Vox Day, that falsely accused a Bernie Sanders supporter of posing as a Trump rally-goer who gave the Hitler salute outside of a Trump event in Chicago. He apologized two weeks later for the “bad info” he found on Twitter. He also once gave an interview with a white nationalist radio program, “The Political Cesspool.”
