

President Donald Trump promoted an independently produced campaign video via his Twitter feed on Wednesday afternoon, which unto itself, is not terribly newsworthy. The discovery, however, that the logo used at in end screen title card features a lion illustration that was also used by a Dutch Twitter account suspended for promoting White Supremacy? Well, that merits a closer look.

The use of the same logo appears to have been first reported by writer Dustin Giebel and former Snopes Managing Editor Brooke Binkowski, who revealed the similarity via a series of tweets:

Binkowski then followed with a link to an archived version of a now-deleted tweet by VDARE, an anti-immigration group criticized for promoting White Supremacy. As one can see in the embedded image below, the lion logo used is the same:



Mediaite reported in March of 2016 about a group that calls themselves the “Lion Guard,” who had stepped up to monitor “anti-MAGA” (as in Make America Great Again) activity online before it can spill out into the real world. Their Twitter feed bio describes themselves as “An informal civilian group dedicated to the safety and security of # Trump supporters by exposing Far-Left infiltrators and saboteurs” and uses the very same lion logo.

The inspiration for their name and logo? It appears to have come from that time Trump retweeted the following Benito Mussolini quote “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”

Binkowski’s discovery started something of a crowd-sourced research project on Twitter, which led to the following claim using research photo search Tin Eye:

Tin-eye shows this image first being used by a suspended account, @keksec_org, on 3/13/16. That account was a Dutch white supremacists that Trump personally retweeted back in 2015:https://t.co/oLKTKKNTEc — Not John Conness, but he gave a good speech once (@puckthecat1) August 29, 2019

The Tweeting of a video that features image alleged to have been used as a symbol of White Supremacy is, of course, not a good look for any campaign, especially one that has often been criticized for using dog whistles in an appeal to xenophobic hate groups. It is difficult to imagine, however, that any senior members of the Trump campaign were specifically aware that this logo was “borrowed” from people espousing hate.

Turns out that the video was created by Twitter user @som3thingwicked, who tweeted it on August 25. Via a Tweet sent after this post was published, this user claims he found the lion image through Google:

For those asking me about lions. I googled “trump logo png.” It returned several images, which I recreated. GOOGLE. TAGGED. THAT. LION. AS. MAGA. If it’s something else, it occurs to me the REAL question is: Why is GOOGLE associating white supremacist metadata with Trump/MAGA? pic.twitter.com/zfhxabZq6F — SOMETHiNG WiCKËD (@som3thingwicked) August 29, 2019

The promotion of a tweet produced someone who features a logo used by White Supremacy groups, however, raises more questions about the judgment of those leading the Trump social media efforts and does nothing to tamp down the reasonable criticism that Trump is consistently flirting with a dangerously xenophobic section that represents a portion of their base of their supporters.

Mediaite has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment and will update this post accordingly.

UPDATE: The Trump campaign has responded with the following statement: “The president shared an independently-produced video that highlighted the strengths of the economy his policies have created. Any conspiracy connected to white supremacy exists only in the fevered minds of reporters who will believe anything negative about the President.”

Editor’s note: this post has been updated since original publishing.

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