Don Jr. Is Ranting Madly About The New York Times Crossword Puzzle (And Not Because It Requires Knowing What Words Mean To Complete It)

On November 22, Donald Trump played host to Black white supremacist Kanye West and infamous white nationalist/Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes with a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach home and golf club. Donald Trump, Jr. didn’t seem to make a peep. But the former president’s eldest spawn suddenly has a lot to say about antisemitism, following an unfortunate design choice in The New York Times.

As Raw Story reports, Don Jr. took to Twitter to wail about how “Disgusting!” it was that the Times’ crossword puzzle seemed to mimic the shape of a swastika.

While Junior wasn’t the only person to take issue with the puzzle, which both the paper and designer swear was unintentional, his problem seemed to be less about antisemitism and more about allowing for accidental antisemitism, as evidenced by the question: “Imagine what they would do to someone who did this and was not ideologically aligned with them?”

You mean, like a former president who broke bread with a couple of antisemites and was rightfully condemned for it?

For their part, The New York Times is defending its puzzle. In a statement to The Jewish Chronicle, a Times spokesperson said: “This is a common crossword design: Many open grids in crosswords have a similar spiral pattern because of the rules around rotational symmetry and black squares.”

This is not the first time the paper’s Games section has had to defend itself against what readers have perceived as anti-Jewish imagery. In 2017, they were accused of another design that looked an awful lot like a swastika, though their response to it was far less formal:

(Via Raw Story)