Donald Trump Jr. compares Syrian refugees to killer Skittles

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 20 September 2016

Not wanting to leave the provocative Twitter posting just to his father, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a graphic on Monday likening Syrian refugees to poisonous Skittles candy.

The image, littered with punctuation and capitalization errors, reads, "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem." This analogy is deeply flawed, and not just because people fleeing a war zone are not fruity treats that make you want to taste the rainbow. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post notes, the Cato Institute published a report last week saying that every year, the risk of an American being killed by a refugee in a terror attack is 1 in 3.64 billion. "We can never, no matter how extreme our vetting, ensure that those who enter the country aren't a risk to its residents any more than we can ensure that people born here won't be," Bump wrote. "Americans born in America commit hundreds of murders a year. In 2014, there were 4.5 murders for every 100,000 Americans. That's a rate thousands of times higher than what's under consideration here."

A spokeswoman for Wrigley Americas, wanting nothing to do with the argument, told The Hollywood Reporter's Seth Abramovitch that "Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing." One fan of the analogy did step forward — former Congressman Joe Walsh, who took credit for it, tweeting to Trump, "That's the point I made last month. Glad you agree." Like the Kit Kat slogan says: Gimme a break.

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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.