Gripped in the throes of a desperation as dark as the proverbial black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night, the Never Trumpers have broken out the nukes. Donald Trump has been smeared as everything from a racist to a fascist to the second coming of Adolf Hitler himself but the one most potent accusation of all has largely been unused – that is until Saturday. Howls that the Donald was a full-blown, Jew hating anti-Semite have been loosed in one last barrage to render him toxic before the Republican party convention in two and a half weeks.

The attacks commenced when of one of Trump’s customary Twitter barrages included an image of Hillary Clinton, money and what appeared to be the Star of David which some claimed to be the Trump campaign invoking a vile stereotype straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion about Jews, money and power. Trump’s team responded to the hullabaloo by deleting the tweet although not before it was weaponized by his political enemies who see the anti-Semitic accusations as the nuclear option.

According to Reuters “Trump tweet attacking Clinton employs image of Jewish star”:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Saturday tweeted an image of rival Hillary Clinton alongside hundred-dollar bills and a Jewish star bearing the words “most corrupt candidate ever!”, prompting outrage and bafflement on social media.

Two hours after his initial tweet, Trump tweeted a similar image in which the six-pointed Star of David – which appears on Israel’s flag and which Jews were forced to wear on their clothing by the Nazis during the Holocaust – was replaced by a circle. The original tweet was deleted.

Critics said the image featuring the star harkened back to centuries-old anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as the belief that Jews are greedy.

“Just saw #DonaldTrump’s Star of David tweet. I’m impressed by his ability to find a way to insult literally every kind of human being,” screenwriter Cole Haddon wrote on Twitter.

“A Star of David, a pile of cash, and suggestions of corruption. Donald Trump again plays to the white supremacists,” wrote Erick Erickson, a conservative radio host who has been critical of Trump.

The tweets originated from Trump’s account, @realDonaldTrump, and no other users were mentioned in them. It was not clear whether someone inside Trump’s campaign made the image or whether he found it somewhere else. Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Trump, did not respond to a request for comment.

The flotsam and jetsam affiliated with the Mitt Romney-Bill Kristol R.A.T. pack pounced and at the forefront was  blowhard Erick Erickson, the Red State blog founder who stands to lose the most career wise after going all in very early on in the Never Trump movement.

Romney operative Katie Porker Packer, head of the Never Trump Super PAC Our Principles was on the tweet like a starving animal chasing table scraps.

Trump deleted the controversial image and replaced it with a similar one sans the controversial six pointed star:

Some however have pointed out that the imagery could actually be interpreted to be a law enforcement badge and not the Jewish symbol at all:

CNN which could more honestly stand for Clinton News Network was quick to use the tweet to dredge up and rehash failed hit jobs of the past comparing the presumptive GOP nominee to white nationalist and former KKK kahuna David Duke:

But Trump has also been slow to disavow the support of anti-Semitic white supremacists who have expressed staunch support for his candidacy.

Trump initially refused to disavow the support of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who continues to promulgate Jewish conspiracy theories, when pressed repeatedly about Duke’s support in an interview by CNN’s Jake Tapper. He would later tweet “I disavow” regarding Duke’s support and blamed his refusal to initially disavow Duke’s support in multiple questions on a faulty earpiece.

And when pressed on the anti-Semitic vitriol and death threats some of his supporters unleashed online against reporter Julia Ioffe over a profile she wrote about Trump’s wife in GQ magazine, Trump said he didn’t “know anything about that.”

“I don’t have a message to the fans,” Trump said when pressed on the anti-Semitic death threats in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in May. “A woman wrote an article that’s inaccurate.”
Trump has also previously retweeted tweets from apparent neo-Nazi supporters, including one from the account “@WhiteGenocideTM,” which also tweeted numerous quotes from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

And NBC the parent company of the Democratic party propaganda arm MSNBC has today pointed out that the original image appeared weeks ago on a “racist feed”:

The meme with the star was posted June 15 by a user with the handle @FishBoneHead1. The account owner’s bio reads: “Comedian : Probably offend you if you are Liberal, Politically Correct, Feminist, Democrat or Piers Morgan.”

Various memes that appear on the feed are highly critical of Clinton, immigrants and Muslims, and some posts include curse words and bigoted images.

Mic first reported that @FishBoneHead1 tweeted the meme, and NBC News found the tweet by dragging the image used in Trump’s tweet into Google image search and restricting the search to the month of June. The only image that the search returned was emblazoned with @FishBoneHead1 on the bottom left.

It’s unclear where Trump or his campaign found the meme, but the candidate has been known to retweet messages and memes from accounts rife with highly offensive content. In January, Trump retweeted a photo from an apparent neo-Nazi supporter’s account, which included anti-Semitic imagery and quotes from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

Trump can expect more slings are arrows directed at him along with accusations that he is the moral equivalent of one of the Nazis in charge of running the gas showers at Auschwitz as the Never Trumpers make their last ditch effort to shame the Republican party into dumping him at the convention.

Ironically the rush to vilify Trump as a Nazi came on the same day that Jewish writer and activist Elie Wiesel passed away. The iconic Nobel laureate was a Holocaust survivor whose works included Night, a harrowing account of his time spent as a youth in Hitler’s network of death camps. Perhaps one of Trump’s staffers didn’t notice the significance of the controversial tweet but at least the campaign modified it to appeal to the sensitivity issues and did so quickly. What is far worse is to exploit the Holocaust for scoring cheap political points like Erickson, Packer and the rest of the Never Trumper riff-raff did, especially on the day of Wiesel’s death but if it isn’t already apparent – those degenerate swine have no capacity for shame whatsoever.