On Saturday, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic attack on rival and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, calling her the most corrupt candidate with a Star of David graphic over a pile of money.
Trump hastily deleted the tweet and replaced it with a new image that placed a poorly photoshopped circle over the star in an attempt to cover it up. But on Monday, he was ready to defend his original tweet, claiming that the star was merely “a Sheriff’s Star, or a simple star.”
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
That was the line campaign surrogates took as well. Speaking in his new role as a paid contributor for CNN on Sunday, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski defended his previous boss by claiming “it’s the same star that sheriff’s departments across the country use all over the place to represent law enforcement” and that calling it anti-Semitic is to “read into it something that isn’t there.”
But an investigation by Mic revealed that the image Trump tweeted with the Star of David originally appeared on an alt-right message board as early as June 22, long before it made it to Trump’s Twitter account. A watermark on the original image lead to a Twitter account that has since been deleted that tweeted a number of racist, Islamophobic images, many of them violent.
Meanwhile, sheriff stars don’t usually look like regular Stars of David, a symbol of Judaism that was also perverted by the Nazis when they forced Jews to wear yellow six-pointed stars. Sheriff’s stars nearly always have circles on the ends of the points or one large circle around the outside of the star.
It’s not the first time Trump’s campaign has mixed with white supremacists and anti-Semitism. He’s frequently tweeted and retweeted images and accounts made by white supremacists, and many more with ties to the alt-right. After the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed the candidate, Trump at first failed to disavow him. He’s thrown around offensive stereotypes about Jewish people. And a number of his online supporters have become notorious for their anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish journalists, something Trump has refused to disavow.
This all comes at a time when white supremacist groups are seeing a revival of support online. A number of related Google search terms, such as “white genocide,” “pro-white,” and “alt-right,” have increased significantly and since 2013 with particularly big spikes since the presidential campaign began last year.