Photo: AP

In a tweet this weekend, Donald Trump Jr. incorrectly identified the Trump supporter photographed raising her arm in a Nazi salute on Friday night as Bernie Sanders volunteer Portia Boulger. The tweet has since been deleted.

Trump Jr. quoted a tweet from “the most despised man in science fiction,” Theodore Beale (@voxday), who wrote, “The ‘Trump Nazi’ is Portia Boulger, who runs the Women for Bernie Sanders Twitter account. It’s another media plant.” Beale included a photo of Boulger, 63, with his tweet.

In fact, the “Trump Nazi” is Birgitt Peterson, 69, of Yorkville, Illinois, who attended Friday’s rally with her husband.

“The Republican Party needs to be broken up, and I believe Donald Trump is the one to do it,” she told the New York Times. She was compelled to sieg heil when confronted with a group of “rude” protestors holding a poster with a picture of Adolf Hitler:

Ms. Peterson, who was born in West Berlin in 1946 and became an American citizen in 1982, said she took offense to the comparison of Mr. Trump to Hitler.

“They said Trump is a second Hitler,” Ms. Peterson said. “I said do you know what that sign stands for? Do you know who Hitler really was?” “I make the point that they are demonstrating something they had no knowledge about,” she said. “If you want to do it right, you do it right. You don’t know what you are doing.”

And so she made the Nazi salute. However: “Absolutely I’m not a Nazi, no,” she said. “I’m not one of those.” And in fact, her husband Don said, “It’s insulting for anyone to assume that we have anything to do with Nazis.”

“We have never done anything other than demonstrate to a bunch of idiots that when they talk about Nazism, they better learn about it first.”



Boulger, for her part, is in fact a Sanders supporter, and was working the phone bank in Chillicothe, Ohio, at the time of the Trump rally. She tweeted on Saturday, “I wasn’t in Chicago last pm spreading some nasty. My hair is short.” She is now asking for an apology from Trump Jr., which has not been forthcoming.