Trump 2020 Campaign Logo stolen from white nationalist, fascist militia group

Politics & Elections
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Brooke Binkowski, an independent journalist and former managing editor at Snopes, flagged that the symbol has been floating around the white nationalist web for years, perhaps most noticeably on VDARE, the white nationalist, virulently anti-immigrant website popular in the Trump admin’s greater orbit.

[…]

As is often the case with things that start online, the logo’s origin is a bit unclear—it appears to be a modification of a design used by a pro-Trump militia called the “Lion Guard.” It now also crops up on tons of bootleg Trump merchandise in various forms, as intellectual property rights do not seem to be a strong tenet of the MAGAsphere.

No points for guessing that the Lion Guard was pretty clearly fascist and associated with white supremacists.

The imagery of the Trump Lion Guard is also associated with Nazi Germany, and with modern Nazi skinhead groups. One of the members of the Lion Guard, using the Twitter username Rhalitra and the white supremacist “anti-cuck” code word, appears to be at the core of the new organization, using a clean, side profile version of the group’s lion icon that has been seen nowhere else before.
Rhalitra also uses another form of the Lion Guard graphic, a black and white version of the graphic in the middle of a good deal of ornamentation, and the motto “God With Trump” on top. God with Trump sounds innocuous, until one realizes that a nearly identical design was worn by Nazis during World War II, with only one different word in the motto: Uns. The Nazi motto was Gott Mit Uns — God With Us.

Here, Rhalitra’s graphic is in the middle. On the left is a graphic used by present-day neoNazis. On the right is a lapel pin worn by the Nazis. The similarities cannot be accidental. The Lion Guard being designed by American who idolize both the Italian Fascists and the Nazis. If you squint, at the bottom of Rhalitra’s Nazi graphic you can just barely see the letters MAGA — standing for Make America Great Again.

The lion has since popped up at VDARE, another white nationalist group.

I don’t think this tells us anything we don’t already know, and I don’t think it’s going to convince anyone who isn’t already paying attention to these matters, but it does seem worth bringing up in case I’m wrong about either of those things.

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That’s a far cry from ‘Trump’s campaign logo stolen from…’, BPC. Just because someone makes a logo doesn’t make it official. Even Trump retweeting it - as I believe he did - doesn’t make it official in any way.

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He posted a campaign video that used that logo at the end of the video. The tweet in question can be found here, in case you didn’t click through in the article. He’s using it in his own campaign materials. It’s not a retweet.

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That “campaign video” has a little @som3thingwicked down in the corner - that twitter user (some kind of MAGA meme warrior) made the video. So even if it wasn’t technically a retweet, it basically was.
https://twitter.com/som3thingwicked/status/1168778941647261698

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Ah. In the circles I run in, this is considered extremely bad form and something akin to art theft, so you’ll have to excuse me missing this.

So the story is simply "Trump uncritically copied a campaign video from a third party and signal boosted it despite imagery taken from white supremacists. Which is considerably less of a story, since we all know he does that all the time anyways.

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It is reassuring to know that the so-called president of the United States isn’t responsible for the things he tweets. Reassuring, that’s the word, right?

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The other twitter account is mentioned at the bottom of your first article, so the title of that article isn’t a shining example of honesty. Not to defend Trump but calling that lion “Trump’s new 2020 logo” isn’t very defensible either.

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Exactly so. There’s plenty of things to get outraged about with Trump. Manufacturing outrage with such easily disproven things only makes the rest seem less worthy.

Eyes on the prize.

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I don’t believe Trump’s official logo is going to feature a lion-face one way or another.

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I can’t reply to this part unless you tell me what we do already know. You are a bit vague. Who are you, Amanda Marcotte? :smiley: But, I am serious…

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It may not be official, but it does make you wonder about the proximity of white nationalism to the Trump campaign. The rest of us shouldn’t be in the position of trying to determine which symbols are official and which ones aren’t. Clearly, he doesn’t mind the association with white nationalism.

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Oh, I don’t disagree. If you have loud supporters who are white nationalists or outright nazis then perhaps one should rethink one’s positions.

But that requires both a sense of shame and a point of view focused on anything other than winning regardless of cost. Trump has neither of those things.

But this? It’s just more noise. As I said, eyes on the prize. This sort of thing is a distraction and a highly emotional reaction to it serves only to excite and motivate his supporters.