(CNN) On Monday morning, the President of the United States retweeted this:

The corrupted Dems trying their best to come to the Ayatollah's rescue.#NancyPelosiFakeNews pic.twitter.com/a0ksPHeXCy — داون آندر (@D0wn_Under) January 13, 2020

It's a photoshopped image of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (California) in traditional Islamic garb, standing in front of an Iranian flag, with the caption "Democrats 2020." It is, at a minimum, anti-Muslim.

The original tweet came from someone with the Twitter handle "D0wn_Under" who describes himself this way: "I identify as King and my pronouns are His Majesty, First of his name." On the original tweet , "D0wn_Under" wrote: "The corrupted Dems trying their best to come to the Ayatollah's rescue. #NancyPelosiFakeNews."

Unless you are deeply obtuse, you get the point: Donald Trump is suggesting -- to his nearly 71 million followers -- that the two top Democrats in Congress are in league somehow with the Iranian regime. Presumably, Trump believes that to be the case because both Pelosi and Schumer have pushed for the administration to offer more detailed information about the supposed "imminent" threat posed by Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani which led to the US military's killing of him by drone strike earlier this month.

There's actually one thing wrong with that sentence above. I wrote "Trump believes" that Schumer and Pelosi are in league with the Iranians. That's almost certainly wrong. What Trump believes is that sharing a doctored image of these two Democrats he will throw red meat to his base, who will eat it up. That it will play into his base's twin dislikes (or at a minimum distrusts) of a) congressional Democrats and b) Muslims. (Remember that Trump ran openly in 2016 on the idea that Muslims were a violent people who hated America -- and that he was the only politician willing to tell the truth about the threat they posed.)

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