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:
Thank you for the support as we MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! pic.twitter.com/qKgwRMSgcf
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2019
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 image at the end of the video Trump tweeted earlier was popular amongst the fascists of Lion Guard and the white supremacists of Vdare in 2016 pic.twitter.com/XBCWoRblvp
— Dusty (@DustinGiebel) August 28, 2019
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:
Tin-eye shows this image first being used by a suspended account, @keksec_org, on 3/13/16.
That account was a Dutch white supremacists that Trump personally retweeted back in 2015:https://t.co/oLKTKKNTEc
— Not John Conness, but he gave a good speech once (@puckthecat1) August 29, 2019
For his part, the creator of the video claimed he just swiped the lion off of Google and had no knowlege of its provenance:
For those asking me about lions.
I googled “trump logo png.” It returned several images, which I recreated.
GOOGLE. TAGGED. THAT. LION. AS. MAGA.
If it’s something else, it occurs to me the REAL question is: Why is GOOGLE associating white supremacist metadata with Trump/MAGA? pic.twitter.com/zfhxabZq6F
— SOMETHiNG WiCKËD (@som3thingwicked) August 29, 2019
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.
