Trump Shares Video on Twitter With Logo Beloved by White Supremacists

Trump Shares Video on Twitter With Logo Beloved by White Supremacists

See if you can guess the worst aspect of this campaign video Donald Trump posted on his Twitter feed on Wednesday:

No, it’s not the migraine-inducing music. Nor is it the swinging animated testicles on the bull at the :20 mark, though that is up there.

The worst aspect is the lion logo at the end, which appears to have originated with a Twitter account that was suspended for promoting white supremacy. Let’s go down the rabbit hole, starting with writer Dustin Giebel:

The Lion Guard was a group that popped up in 2016 to dedicate itself to monitoring “anti-MAGA” activity online. The group’s Twitter bio says it maintains “the safety and security of #Trump supporters by exposing Far-Left infiltrators and saboteurs.”

The group takes its name from a quote from Italian fascist Benito Mussolini that says “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Truly, there is nothing subtle about any of this.

VDARE, for those unfamiliar, is a website that mostly focuses on opposition to immigration and has been linked to white nationalists and white supremacists.

Twitter uses traced the first appearance of the logo back to a Dutch white supremacist group, which tweeted it in 2016. That Donald Trump had also tweeted praise from that same white supremacist account the year before is just icing on the cake:

For his part, the creator of the video claimed he just swiped the lion off of Google and had no knowlege of its provenance:

Wild how white supremacist or antisemitic imagery keeps finding its way to Donald Trump, who happily retweets it to his millions of followers without an apparent second thought. He did it with the aforementioned Dutch white supremacist group in 2015. And yet, he did it during the 2016 campaign when he sent out an image of Hillary Clinton and money over Stars of David. (His campaign later claimed, hilariously, that those were “sheriff’s badges.) He did it when he tweeted out a racist meme about “black-on-black” crime statistics that contained made-up numbers.

Hopefully all these past incidents answer the video maker’s question.

Gary Legum

Gary Legum has written about politics and culture for Independent Journal Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Wonkette, AlterNet and McSweeney's, among others. He currently lives in his native state of Virginia.

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