Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Monday that an image posted by Donald J. Trump on Twitter over the weekend that showed a photo of Mrs. Clinton against a backdrop of $100 bills and a Star of David was “blatantly anti-Semitic.”
The post accused Mrs. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, of being the “most corrupt candidate ever.” But critics seized on the episode as the latest example of a longtime pattern of racially charged remarks by Mr. Trump, saying the post was meant to exploit stereotypes against Jewish people.
The backlash was swift enough to cause Mr. Trump to do something relatively out of character: He deleted the original post, later sharing an image showing Mrs. Clinton next to a circle instead of the six-point star.
The news website Mic traced the first image, posted by Mr. Trump on Saturday, to a message board containing anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi imagery, and to Twitter accounts that circulated the images.
Sarah Bard, the Clinton campaign’s director of Jewish outreach, said in a statement: “Donald Trump’s use of a blatantly anti-Semitic image from racist websites to promote his campaign would be disturbing enough, but the fact that it’s a part of a pattern should give voters major cause for concern. Now, not only won’t he apologize for it, he’s peddling lies and blaming others.”
Though he replaced the image (one observer noted that the tips of the star were still visible in the new post), Mr. Trump took to Twitter on Monday to defend his original decision to post the image with a star.
“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!” he wrote.
But some social media users disputed Mr. Trump’s suggestion that a sheriff’s star had any resemblance to the Star of David. One person askedhim why he would delete a posting if he truly believed it was a sheriff’s star.
In a statement released on Monday night, Mr. Trump dismissed Mrs. Clinton’s campaign’s criticism as “false” and “ridiculous” and repeated his claim that the image was a “basic star often used by sheriffs who deal with criminals and criminal behavior.”
Mr. Trump’s supporters insisted that the image never contained a Star of David and that people were being too sensitive or politically correct. Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, appeared on Sunday on CNN and called the reaction “political correctness run amok.”
Other Trump supporters said on Twitter that the news media was exploiting a nonissue. They said they supported the theory that those accusing Mr. Trump of anti-Semitism were creating a fictional subtext for the image.
“The only reason the Trump sheriff star tweet is controversial is because CNN makes it that way,” wrote one supporter of Mr. Trump.
“Sheriff star, makes the point to her corruption, thus sheriff need arrest her, Stop the spin,” wrote another.
The Anti-Defamation League has long condemned Mr. Trump’s remarks on immigrants as hate speech and stereotyping. It called on him in 2015 to stop “fomenting hatred.”
On Monday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s chief executive, said in an interview that Mr. Trump’s handling of the controversy over the posting did not pass muster. “The most appropriate response to the criticisms would be to address them head-on, to apologize, and to articulate firmly and forcefully that bigotry of any sort has no place in this campaign, and that hate has nothing to do with making America great again,” Mr. Greenblatt said.
Later Monday, Mr. Trump seemed eager to move beyond the episode. He posted a flurry of messages about his potential choices for a vice-presidential running mate: “The only people who are not interested in being the V.P. pick are the people who have not been asked!”
He then wrote a post that blamed radical Islam for terrorist attacks.
The New York Times
