The Trump kids had a terrible weekend on social media
Donald Trump is known for creating scandal after scandal on Twitter with 140-character missives fired off at all hours of the night. But over the weekend, it was Trump’s three oldest children who found themselves facing a wave of backlash for their own unfortunate social media posts.
It began on Friday when Trump’s oldest son Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted a link from InfoWars.com, a website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
The article featured in the tweet alleges that Clinton might have been wearing an earpiece to the previous night’s Commander-in-Chief Forum where both candidates took questions on issues concerning veterans and the military. The evidence provided for the allegation consists of a series of less-than-convincing screenshots that show the faintest bit of light reflecting off the candidate’s inner ear.
Some observers were quick to point out that other camera angles made it clear there was no earpiece. However most of Twitter focused on the fact that Don Jr. was citing Info Wars, a site that has promoted the idea that both 9/11 and the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary were conspiracies perpetrated by the U.S. government.
But tweeting a hatchet job from a known conspiracy theorist was just the beginning of what would become a terrible week on social media for the Trump family. The next day, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s second-oldest child, Instagramed a photo of one of Judaism’s most famous rabbinical proverbs and attributed it to famed British actress Emma Watson.
The quote is a paraphrase of Rabbi Hillel the Elder’s three questions, a well-known passage in Judaism. Ivanka Trump converted to Orthodox Judaism when she married her husband, Jared Kushner. The internet was its typical ruthless self.
.@IvankaTrump quotes Hillel, credits #EmmaWatson instead. https://t.co/oxNmN8ZBAz pic.twitter.com/eF3R3hcSDq
— Thea Glassman (@theakglassman) September 9, 2016
Around the same time Ivanka was dealing with the fallout from her misattributed quote, Trump’s third child, Eric was dealing with his own online snafu. Responding to Hillary Clinton’s recent statement that half of Trump’s supporters are a “basket of deplorables,” Eric Trump tweeted a picture of a large Trump rally with the caption “Look at the #BasketOfDeplorables in Pensacola Florida last night!” The only problem was that the picture Eric had chosen was not taken in Pensacola, Florida the night before but had actually been taken one year ago at a Trump rally in Dallas, Texas.
After several people pointed out the error online, Trump tweeted a second photo of the much smaller crowd in Pensacola Florida with the hashtag #WhatDifferenceDoesItMake, an odd reference to comments made by Hillary Clinton at a 2013 Benghazi hearing.
After a rough start to the weekend on Friday and Saturday, you might think that Trump’s campaign managers would have taken away his children’s phones and locked them in a drawer before Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. But instead, the Trumps continued to post on social media throughout the day which led to yet another awkward moment.
Donald Trump, Jr., also responding to Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, posted the following image of Trump surrogates photoshopped into the poster from the action movie The Expendables.
In addition to, once again, promoting conspiracy theorist and Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones (that’s him, second from the right), the photo also features the cartoon image of Pepe the Frog, an online meme that has been appropriated by some of the darkest parts of the white supremacist web.
Back in May, the Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi explored the history of how Pepe the Frog became an iconic image for white nationalist trolls on 4chan. One anonymous white supremacist characterized the project to make Pepe a white supremacist meme by telling Nuzzi “Turning Pepe into a white nationalist icon was one of our original goals, although we’ve had our hands in many other things.“ Another anonymous white nationalist told Nuzzi “We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association.”
Donald Trump, Jr. wrote in the Instagram post that the image had been sent to him by “a friend.” It is not clear who Trump’s friend was or whether they were aware of the image’s ties to online white nationalism.
But as Vanity Fair points out, the image is similar to one tweeted by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke the day before.
And just ten days before the Instagram post, Donald Jr. had come under fire for retweeting a well known Neo-Nazi academic by the name of Kevin MacDonald.
As the Jewish Daily Forward noted at the time, Donald Jr.’s apparent embrace of MacDonald was met with elation by Neo-Nazis on twitter.
One might expect that the Trump campaign will begin monitoring the Trump children’s online presences more closely. But then again, at this point, it’s hard to say what one should and should not expect the Trump campaign to do about anything.