Whether he meant to or not, Donald Trump Jr. set off a firestorm on Twitter Monday night after comparing Syrian refugees to Skittles, blasting out a picture he declared “says it all”.
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In fact, this isn’t the first time Trump Jr.’s very own Skittle analogy was shared, as he plagiarized the tweet from former Congressman Joe Walsh.
Trump argued that no Syrian refugees should be permitted into the USA if any of them posed a potential security threat, using a theme pulled from Nazi propaganda and white supremacist memes. Wrigley, the CEO company to brands like Skittles and Juicy Fruit, must have been shocked that Jr. used the sugary snack as an advertising method to promote the anti-refugee clause. It is one of Warren County’s biggest employers.
Trump adviser Jack Kingston, a former USA congressman from Georgia, also defended the tweet in an interview with MSNBC.
The U.S. accepted its 10,000th Syrian refugee in late August and plans to accept at least 110,000 more refugees in the fiscal year 2017, a White House official said.
“This was not done with my permission, I don’t support his politics and I would never take his money to use it. Would you take a handful?” the statement read.
But the analogy in reference to Syrian refugees isn’t new either.
This image says it all.
The president called on nations to work together to stop isis, end the conflict in Syria and take in helpless refugees, saying “We have to have the empathy to see ourselves. We respectfully refrain from further comment, as that could be misinterpreted as marketing”.
Even beyond Kittos’ photo, immigrants helped facilitate Trump Jr.’s tweet in other important ways.
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Much of the backlash included images of dead or injured Syrian children. But a recent report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that an American’s odds of dying in a terrorist attack perpetrated by a refugee in any given year are about one in 3.64 billion.
