Here’s something that happened. Donald Trump’s son and one of his top campaign surrogates, Donald Trump Jr., made a flip Holocaust metaphor during an interview with a Philadelphia radio station on Wednesday.
“The media has been [Hillary Clinton’s] number one surrogate in this,” Trump Jr. begins. “Without the media, this wouldn’t even be a contest, but the media has built her up. They’ve let her slide on every indiscrepancy, on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing. If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”
To use the Holocaust or slavery as a metaphor is not necessarily the most offensive thing in the world, though other Republicans have gotten in trouble in the past for saying similar things. Former presidential candidate and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was lambasted last year for saying that President Barack Obama was marching Israelis “to the door of the oven” with the Iranian nuclear deal. Former presidential candidate and current Trump supporter Ben Carson, meanwhile, has been criticized for comparing U.S. policies to those of Nazi Germany and the Affordable Care Act to slavery.
Trump’s comments might be placed in the realm of excusable gaffe or simple hyperbole were it not for the fact of Donald Trump’s support among the alt-right and of Donald Trump Jr.’s own troubled history palling around with white supremacists.
Over the weekend, Trump posted an image of white supremacist meme “Pepe the frog” on Instagram.
Right Wing Watch has documented more such recent incidents:
This isn’t Trump Jr.’s first, second or even third time associating himself with white supremacists.
In March, he appeared on a radio show with James Edwards, host of the white supremacist radio show Political Cesspool.
In July, it was noted he followed several white supremacists on Twitter.
Less than two weeks ago, he retweeted a prominent white supremacist. And that wasn’t even the first time he’s done so: Trump Jr. once retweeted a white supremacist’s false claim that a Trump supporter pictured giving the Nazi salute was actually a Bernie Sanders fan in disguise.
Given all of this, Trump might be wise to steer away from gas chamber references in the future.
Update, 1:45 p.m.: Trump Jr. has reportedly responded to the uproar over his comments to indicate that he was talking about the death penalty and not the Holocaust.
