Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:09 pm
Donald Trump is more and more like the proverbial kid with his hand in the cookie jar, caught red-handed but denying to the last he was stealing a cookie. In fact, everyone was stealing a cookie but him. This “weenie” behavior, this shirking of responsibility and maturity, is something we all remember as kids, and yet somehow supposed to represent a demonstration of power by would-be Ãœbermensch Trump.
It has been demonstrated by now that Trump’s infamous Star of David attack on Hillary Clinton was lifted directly from a neo-Nazi message board. The story we are hearing from the Trump camp is that it was just a star – a sheriff’s star, if you can believe that. You know, because Hitler made all Jews in the Third Reich walk around with sheriffs stars on their clothes, like those folks above on their way to Auschwitz.
And remember when Rose Hamid wore a sheriff’s star to protest Donald Trump?
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I don’t know how people failed to correctly identify the symbol as a sheriff’s star before.
Trump, of course, is still clinging to this sheriff star fantasy and pushed it via Twitter on July 4 (as his way of celebrating Independence Day?):
Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff's Star, or plain star!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2016
So the media is dishonest and Trump is not a raging anti-Semite? I’m sorry, but if we see your hand in the cookie jar, it’s more than likely you had your hand in the cookie jar. The real problem is that all those cookies had swastikas on them. We’re all sure at this point that Trump would blame the baker, but he was eating the Nazi cookies.
Fistfuls of them. If this were an isolated incident, it would be easier to think Trump just made a mistake. But you don’t accidentally retweet white supremacists 75 times. Even Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face just once.
As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote Tuesday in an opinion piece at CNN,
The star is integral to making the image work for Trump’s mainstream and fringe constituencies. Disenfranchised whites will read clearly the conspiracy theory implied: Clinton as a surrogate for Jews, who can work through her to exercise their power. Jews-money-dishonesty: we’ve seen it countless times.
[…]
In 2016, Trump has continued to retweet others’ Nazi emblems and messages. In this way he introduces his millions of followers to a subculture of white anger, legitimating concepts like “Jewmerica” and “white genocide” by giving them a national hearing.
Trump doesn’t mind the negative press when he does these things. He’s getting the message out. Deleting them doesn’t undo the damage, but it also, as she points out, Trump knows “the impact of images like these is immediate, and that the originals will continue to circulate, even if he deletes them.”
Meanwhile, he gets some mileage about being persecuted for defying political correctness. Or his surrogates, like CNN’s Corey Lewandowski, get that mileage for him, in front of a world audience.
Adolf Hitler made a lot of empty promises and issued a ton of denials too (and threw his share of childish tantrums), on his way to the top. They meant nothing, and Donald Trump’s denials mean nothing. He is exactly what he seems to be. And no person with two brain cells to rub together will be fooled by the claim that it is the media, and not Trump, that is lying to us in this instance.
Because it isn’t the media, but Trump himself who is sending these messages; it is Trump himself who is announcing in language we all understand, that the greatness he aims for is right from the 1930s.
And when he is a standing on the biggest stage of all and giving the Hitler salute (yes, that’s what the Nazi’s called it), when he is demanding a personal oath of loyalty from his followers, we know it isn’t a sheriff that Donald Trump wants to be, but the Führer.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
