This prompted The Guardian to ask:
“Donald Trump, stacks of money, the White House, an American flag … and, apparently, Nazi soldiers: Is this the face of the new Republican frontrunner for president of the United States?”
It wasn’t long before people noticed, RawStory reports.
“@realDonaldTrump @20committee are those troops in the bottom Wehrmacht?! #falseflag”
— Michael Niemerg (@MichaelNiemerg) July 14, 2015
“#MEGAFAIL ===> Yes, those aren’t just WW2 Germans, they’re the Waffen-SS in the Trump campaign pic”
It wasn’t long before the offensive tweet was yanked, but in the interim, scores of screen grabs were taken.
After a short while, the source of the stock images was identified.
Found @realDonaldTrump’s german soldier stock image here (searched “world war II soldiers”) http://t.co/GKkcNTUKpm pic.twitter.com/ysWGeePZlr
— Reed F. Richardson (@reedfrich) July 14, 2015
So then Trump’s campaign played a game of “when all else fails, blame the intern”, and said “Mr. Trump has been in Charlottesville, Virginia all day at the opening of a development. A young intern created and posted the image and did not see the very faded figures within the flag of the stock photo. The intern apologized and immediately deleted the tweet.
This led commentator Simon Maloy to say:
“Trump interns are apparently making campaign publicity materials. On their own initiative. With no approval process. Tight ship over there.
2:05 P.M. – 14 Jul 2015.
However, as USA Today notes, Trump’s harsh and racist rhetoric regarding immigration has put him in the lead over all of the other GOP hopefuls and struck a chord with some voters.
In a nationwide survey conducted by USA Today and Suffolk University, Trump is well ahead of Jeb Bush at 17 percent and 14 percent respectively. Out of the swelling army of GOP contenders, Trump and Bush are the only competitors who reach double digits. Despite this, he’s still the weakest competitor among all the GOP candidates against Hillary Clinton.
He may lead in the GOP field, but he doesn’t stack up well among the seven hopefuls in a hypothetical duel against Clinton, who is currently the leading Democratic nominee. Instead, Bush is the strongest candidate against the former secretary of state. He falls behind her by four points nationwide, 46 percent – 42 percent. Trump trails by 17 points, at 51 percent – 34 percent.
Almost half of all who were surveyed-48 percent, say that Trump’s remarks concerning illlegal immigrants, especially those characterizing Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers, matter a great deal to their vote. Fortunately only 15 percent say the comments make them more likely to support him, while 48 percent say the comments make them less likely to support him, USA Today reports.
“We’ve seen Donald Trump make it to the top, but the question is, can he stay on top?” asks David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “In 2012, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain led the GOP primary field briefly but only to fade.”
As for that photo of the Nazi Waffen soldiers, it’s actually a photo taken of a World War II reenactment near Kent, England, Mother Jones reports. According to the photographer, George Cairns, it was taken some time within the last five years. He’d been playing video games when the photo went viral and his Twitter feed went nuts in response to the Trump story.
Cairns, who lives in St. Albans, just north of London, is a freelance stock photographer who teaches photography and he likes to frequent war reenactments because he pick up realistic-looking stock images. Nazis aren’t his only subject. He also takes photos of American GIs and other soldiers. Cairns doesn’t know a lot about Trump except for a controversy that erupted over a golf course the billionaire purchased in Scotland last year.
What does Cairns think of Trump using his image to endorse his candidacy?
“Well luckily, it’s not endorsed him in a sense … So that’s a good thing,” he said. “I’m not a Trump supporter. I can sleep okay tonight.”
Stock photographers don’t have control over who uses their photos, Cairns told Mother Jones. As a photographer, the best you can do is pick keywords for the images you upload that let people know what they’re buying. In this case, however, Trump’s staff should have been able to tell what they were looking at.
“I tried to keyword it carefully so people would be aware that it’s WWII fascists.”
Perhaps it’s like what Maloy said, and those who run the “tight ship” over at the Trump campaign didn’t quite pick up on the not-so-subtle hint.
Will the Trump crew fire off more clueless tweets?
Stay tuned.
