Donald Trump says controversial tweet blown out of proportion by media

The offensive image tweeted by Donald Trump over the weekend.

(Image credit: Twitter.com/cnnpolitics)

last updated 5 July 2016

Donald Trump says you've got it all wrong regarding the image of Hillary Clinton he tweeted over the weekend that's been lambasted as being anti-Semitic.

The tweet, since deleted, was of a graphic that featured Clinton, $100 bills, and what appeared to be a Star of David containing the words "Most corrupt candidate ever." He faced a swift backlash from people saying this played into anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and money, and later posted the image again, this time with the star replaced with a circle. Trump was silent about the controversy until Monday morning, when he tweeted, "Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff's Star, or plain star!"

The image was originally posted June 15 by a Twitter user with the handle @FishBoneHead1, Mic.com reports. The account has since been shut down, but it previously tweeted other offensive memes against Clinton, Muslims, African-Americans, and immigrants, NBC News says. Trump has run into trouble on Twitter before — in January, he retweeted a photo from an apparent neo-Nazi supporter's account, and in February retweeted the Twitter account @WhiteGenocideTM. Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center studies extremist messages on the internet, and told NBC News, "It's not that easy to find these materials. It's just astounding that, time after time after time, somebody there in the campaign, somehow, is running across the material. A one-off would be one thing, but it's happened repeatedly now."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.