Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino took blame for the tweet on Monday, but claimed he thought it was a sheriff’s star, not a Star of David.
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It also included stacks of money, with a text describing Mrs Clinton as “most corrupt candidate ever!” The account has since been deleted.
Still, Trump later deleted the tweet and replaced it with a new image that used a circle instead of a star.
“And Trump tweeted this, ‘Hillary Clinton the most corrupt candidate ever.’ Now of course, the media immediately came out and said that this was ‘anti-Semitic.’ But of course, it’s all true”.
One of the most pointed arguments against Donald Trump as the Republican nominee from his critics on the Right derives from his use of “earned media” – that is, new coverage of his campaign – as a nearly-exclusive vehicle for getting his message out. “It was lifted from an anti-Hillary Twitter user where countless images appear”, he said.
Scavino also said that as the campaign’s social media director, “I would never offend anyone and therefore chose to remove the image”. The image had also appeared on a white supremacist message board filled with anti-Semitic messages. The Twitter account, FishBoneHead1, no longer exists.
Just two weeks from the Republican National Convention, Trump’s vice presidential search – and speculation about who he’ll pick – is at a fever pitch. “It’s a matter of common sense”.
“I get tweeted pictures like this all the time from anti-Semites and racists and white supremacists”, he added.
Trump has drawn heavy criticism from leaders in his own party throughout his campaign for president – concerns that were heightened over the Fourth of July weekend after Trump tweeted an image of Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton’s face against a background of $100 dollar bills and adjacent to a Star of David, a tweet widely characterized as anti-Semitic.
Even though Gov. Chris Christie is one of Donald Trump’s key advisors, support for the presumed Republican presidential nominee among state Republicans has been soft, when compared with support for Mitt Romney, the party’s candidate in the 2012 election. A private meeting last week between Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who will make the ultimate decision about whether Clinton will be indicted, has led some to call Lynch’s objectivity into question.
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, appearing on CNN earlier in the morning, cited Trump’s “long and storied history” of leading a “parade”, employing Jews as senior executives at his organization, and supporting Israel as evidence the tweet was not meant to be anti-Semitic.
Trump initially refused to disavow the support of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who continues to promulgate Jewish conspiracy theories, when pressed repeatedly about Duke’s support in an interview by CNN’s Jake Tapper. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article.
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