June 19th 2020

By Emily Singer

American Independent Foundation

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign began running Facebook ads on Wednesday that contained a symbol that Nazis used to identify political prisoners at concentration camps.

The ads asked Trump supporters to come together to fight against “far-left mobs” and “antifa,” the loosely organized movement of anti-fascists who Trump and other Republicans claim without evidence were behind violence and looting at some anti-racism protests across the country.

The Trump campaign claimed the red upside-down triangle, used by Nazis as part of their badge system for identifying categories of prisoners at concentration camps, was actually an antifa symbol.

Alerted to the ads by the Washington Post, Facebook deactivated them, stating, “We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”

“This is an emoji,” the “Trump War Room” Twitter account tweeted. “It’s also a symbol widely used by Antifa. It was used in an ad about Antifa. It is not in the ADL’s Hate Symbols Database.”

The solid red symbol, however, is not widely used by antifa. A common antifa symbol is a pair of flags, one black and one red, inside a circle.

There is little concrete evidence that antifa was behind the violence and property destruction at the protests, and ample evidence that right-wing “boogaloo” extremists, who call for an uprising against the U.S. government, have caused some of the chaos as part of their determination to set off a civil war.

The Trump campaign was criticized for using Nazi imagery.

“The President of the United States is campaigning for reelection using a Nazi concentration camp symbol. Nazis used the red triangle to mark political prisoners and people who rescued Jews. Trump & the RNC are using it to smear millions of protestors,” Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish organization, tweeted. “Their masks are off.”

Holocaust scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt said she found the use of the symbol “shocking.”

“It’s an insensitivity, and likely indicative of who’s around the table when these decisions are being made,” Lipstadt told the Washington Post.

This is not the first time the Trump campaign has come under fire for using symbols that evoke Nazism.

In 2016, Trump tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton superimposed over $100 bills and a Star of David, a well-recognized symbol of Judaism, calling her corrupt. Trump deleted the image and claimed the Star of David had actually been a sheriff’s badge.

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