On Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. compared media coverage of his father to the Holocaust, saying that if his dad lied the way Hillary Clinton does, the press would be “warming up the gas chamber right now.” The comment comes hot on the heels of an Instagram post wherein Donald Trump‘s oldest son celebrating his inclusion in — as Clinton described the elder Trump’s fanbase — the “basket of deplorables.” In the photograph, he and his father are pictured alongside Pepe the frog, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others.
“They’ve let her slide on every discrepancy, on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing,” Trump Jr. said. “If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”
The Anti-Defamation League weighed in to chide the younger Trump for making light of the Holocaust and called on him to retract his comment.
.@DonaldJTrumpJr: Trivialization of the Holocaust and gas chambers is NEVER okay. https://t.co/jL2ZC9Z8pH
— ADL (@ADL) September 15, 2016
As outrage began to build, the Trump Jr. told NBC’s Katy Tur that his comment was “referencing corporal punishment,” and was not intended to be anti-Semitic. As NBC producer Micah Grimes points out, the gas chamber is a very uncommon execution method in the United States. It was used only 11 times between 1979 and 1999.
https://twitter.com/MicahGrimes/status/776468412918747136
https://twitter.com/MicahGrimes/status/776489211625021440
https://twitter.com/MicahGrimes/status/776490245667815424
This isn’t the first time the Trump campaign has been accused of using anti-Semitic rhetoric. One of the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign slogans — “America First” — is one that was used by an organization of American Nazi sympathizers who urged the U.S. government to appease Hitler during World War II. In July, Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic meme that pictured Clinton over a backdrop of money and next to the Star of David. His staff replaced the star with a circle, but Trump later doubled down on his right to post the original imagery, insisting that he thought the Star of David was a sheriff’s star.
(Via New York Times & CNN)
