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Trump Flashes White Supremacist Hand Gesture While Saying ‘AOC’ During Turning Point USA Speech
Donald Trump gave a speech on Tuesday to Turning Point USA, which he described as "some of the greatest and smartest young people on the planet".
That's a debatable characterization.
Both Charlie Kirk (Turning Point's founder) and Candace Owens (the group's former director of communications) are right-wing darlings in the Trump era, despite being controversial and, some say, wholly cartoonish, figures. The group has seized the spotlight in 2019 with Kirk and Owens scoring speaking time at CPAC
He’s always doing that when he’s explaining something. Trump Jnr has started doing it. There’s more than enough to accuse of, but i doubt whether this is one of them.
again, i would encourage you to do a little research on this. not saying you’re wrong… just saying don’t be so sure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/world/europe/marine-le-pen-selfie-gesture.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/15/marie-le-pen-makes-ok-hand-gesture-used-by-white-supremacists
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48293817
Nah, it’s a nice accusation, but I’ve watched him do it regularly whenever he’s explaining something, even during the primaries when I doubt he was even aware of the other meaning.
Hes famous for the pinch 3. Not the OK.
One of the ways Trump wins is by throwing off his opponents as to whether he is an evil genius, an idiot, or crazy. Maybe he threw up an “A ok” symbol so that when people call him out for being racist, he can say it is an established gesture meaning something else so therefore all acts of overt and covert racism should be viewed with suspicion as fake news by an Establishment bent on taking him down. Or it is a dog whistle. Or it is the random hand movements of a doddering old man who uses his hands a lot. Who knows? Who cares? “Haul ass and bypass.” Stick to the things that matter and hammer them into the public consciousness. Kids in cages. Immigration goon squads. Charlottesville. The demos do not have the will to focus on minutiae.
According to the Anti Defamation League, the “white power” meaning of the gesture is a hoax that started on 4chan and his since been used by right-wingers to troll liberals:
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-hand-gesture
The article does, though, say that apparently some white supremacists have dropped the original trolling intent of the gesture and seem to be using it as a sincere gesture of hatred. Snopes also has a page on an incident from a while back where a White House intern made the OK gesture in a group photo. The intern, Jack Breuer, apparently is Jewish:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/intern-white-power-hand-gesture/
Trump seems to be making the sign to emphasize the “O” in “AOC”, though who knows with this guy….
Just for the record, the previous comment was not an attempt to mitigate the disgust any decent human being should feel at the racist garbage that comes out of Trump’s mouth and Twitter account. If he is, in fact, trying to force the Democrats to rally around Omar just so he can then turn the entire party into a lightning rod for the hatred of Ilhan he’s fomented among his base, it’s a whole new dimension in cynical political calculation. Lee Atwater looks pedestrian by comparison.