The scandal that broke out over the weekend when Donald Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic image of a six-pointed star, a pile of cash, and Hillary Clinton, has to be seen as not an isolated incident but as part of disturbing pattern where the candidate freely borrows images from the racist far right and circulates them on Twitter.

To tweet out such an image and then clumsily walk it back, as Trump did, might seem like a slip-up. But this whole farce is actually in keeping with the candidate’s remarkably successful strategy of playing footsie with the most extremist elements of American society.

The Star of David tweet wasn’t a pure retweet, since Trump borrowed a image from an earlier tweeter but deleted other identifying information. Still, taking the image from a dubious tweeter follows the main contours of Trump’s larger pattern of dubious re-tweeting. Even those closest to Trump acknowledge he has a problem with re-tweets. Melania Trump, the candidate’s wife, told Sean Hannity in April, “Sometimes I feel that, you know, the retweets sometimes get him in trouble. So I say, stay away from retweets.” Melania was specifically thinking about her mate retweeting a nasty message comparing Melania’s physical appearance with that of Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi. But the retweets that get the presumptive Republican nominee in the hottest water are when he passes along messages from Nazis and white supremacists, which he’s done repeatedly.

In November, Trump retweeted fake crime statistics that falsely claimed that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks. The stats came from a tweeter who expressed open admiration for Adolph Hitler. Trump has also re-tweeted racists like @whitegenocideTM. On at least five occasions Trump re-tweeted an account whose byline read “#whitegenocide is real”.

Trump’s twitter feed is a hub of white nationalist activity.

Indeed, Trump’s twitter feed is a hub of white nationalist activity that extends beyond accounts like @whitegenocideTM, so much so that according to research done during January 2016 by the Twitter analytical firm Little Bird, 62 percent of those re-tweeted by Trump during that month follow multiple white-supremacist accounts.