So NOW is it OK to call them Nazis yet?

I think everyone knows how I feel about Trump. But I actually think this could've been an honest, thoughtless mistake. Maybe not. But, like Bill meeting Loretta Lynch at the airport on the Tarmac ( which apparently he does often in the rarified world of private jets and tarmacs ), it could have been something that he or some staffer did without thinking or seeing what other people would see.

And just as Republicans who have met Bill personally on such tarmacs in similar circumstances are now going crazy to denounce it, Democrats are seizing on this today to denounce it, when it might have been an honest mistake.

And this is coming from someone not exactly inclined to give the Trump the benefit of the doubt.

 

I agree. Just one more example of how Trump is totally out of touch with the OPTICS (seems to be a favorite word of the talking heads this week) of any situation.

 

<And in order for your premise to be true, you have to believe that whoever designed that graphic just randomly came up with a star of David on a pile of money.<

But that's the thing. I CAN believe that. The money was going to be in the image, because they're trying to say she's enriched herself using shady tactics (some pretty world-class projection going on there, by the way). And the text-in-a-shape is classic ad graphics. So I absolutely can believe it was unintentional and someone just chose the 6-sided star over a circle or a 5 sided star or a sunburst shape because he/she thought it looked best.

I CAN also believe it was intentional. If so, they would have to have known it would not go unnoticed, and would get blowback. And because of the previous reports of Trump's admiration for Hitler (which I've read before), and the brownshirt-y tactics of some of his supporters, this would tie into that and underline that perception, which is generally not a perception one wants. But perhaps they made a calculated decision that it would be catnip to his base, and anyone who would raise objections wouldn't be voting for him anyway.

I still think that's less likely. The section of his base that would respond favorably to an anti-semitic dog whistle are the exact people who will vote for him come hell or high water anyway. The ones who will, in Trump's now-famous words, vote for him even if he shot someone in the middle of Times Square. Yeah, yeah, it's always good to solidify your base, but in Trump's case, exactly because of his fascistic tendencies - and the tendency of certain people to want to follow that - he didn't really need to blow that whistle. Meanwhile, this sort of thing, if intentional, runs the risk of underlining the "this guy could actually be a Fascist" narrative and cost him among those who still haven't made up their minds. It seems a high-risk, low (additional) reward strategy to me if it was intentional. Which doesn't mean it couldn't have been. But I would guess not.

 

Whoa. If this story holds up, it looks like the Trump campaign didn't originate the image (as I assumed), but just stole it from a far-right anti-semitic site. That tracks with their usual laziness, for sure.

So now it's down to "is it lazy but not intentionally anti-semitic (but what were they doing trolling around neo-Nazi sites in the first place?)" vs. "was this an absolutely intentional dog whistle to the anti-semites in the base from the get go?"

Either way, if this really came from where it seems to have come from, then I've changed my mind. They absolutely ought to pay a political price for this.