Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump kept up the defense of his anti-Semitic tweet on Wednesday, accusing the media of “racially profiling” to manufacture a controversy.
The tweet, which accused Hillary Clinton of being “the most corrupt candidate in history,” showed the Jewish Star of David placed on top of a pile of $100 bills. It was widely condemned. Trump, however, blamed the “dishonest media” for unfairly maligning him.
“CNN started this dialogue, going: ‘It is the Star of David, and because it is the Star of David, Donald Trump has racist ...’ These people are sick. I’m telling you,” he said. “They’re racially profiling, not us.”
“The star is a star, not the Star of David,” he continued. “How sick are they? They’re the ones with the bad tendencies.”
Trump also suggested that the tweet couldn’t be anti-Semitic because his daughter Ivanka, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jewish. Instead, he insisted that the six-pointed star “could have been a sheriff’s star. It could have been a regular star.”
On Saturday, soon after Trump’s account tweeted the image, which had earlier been shared in a white supremacist forum, his campaign deleted that tweet. A new version, in which the star was replaced with a circle, was sent out.
But Trump said Wednesday that his campaign erred in correcting the image, insisting that the star is “fine.”
“I said, ‘You should not have taken it down.’ They took it down,” he said. “Too bad. You should have left it up.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.