Reports of Nazi Germany imagery and gestures at Donald Trump rallies have bubbled up in the news media in recent days but so far, they have turned out to be either hoaxes or apparent misunderstandings by the journalists who spot them.
On Monday, Nick Kalman, a Fox News producer, posted a photo of Twitter of two men that he said were “Trump supporters sporting armbands in Florida.” The photo showed two men with red, white and blue armbands with a “T” on them, conjuring up images of the armband Nazi soldiers wore.
Donald Trump makes members of his Orlando crowd raise their right hands and swear to vote in the primary. pic.twitter.com/EVenRilJrV
— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) March 5, 2016
Kalman’s photo was passed around on Twitter by others in media who commented on it with a mix of shock and bewilderment.
“Are these guys real or plants?” one journalist remarked.
“Please tell me this is a hoax?” said another.
But others identified the two men as a pair of pranksters who had previously executed similar stunts at rallies for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, where they stood behind her wearing “settle for Hillary” shirts, and Republican candidate Marco Rubio, where one of them stood up and accused Rubio of stealing his girlfriend.
Three days before that, on Friday, a Chicago Tribune photographer captured an image that seemed to depict an elderly white woman posing in a Nazi salute at a Trump rally in Chicago.
“Donald Trump supporter Birgitt Peterson, center, of Yorkville, argues with protesters on March 11, 2016, outside the UIC Pavilion after the rally for the Republican presidential candidate was canceled,” said the photo caption.
In the photo, Peterson is seen wearing a “Trump: Make America Great Again” T-shirt, looking at a protester and holding her arm up and out with the palm down.
The next day, Peterson explained to the New York Times that she was pushing back on anti-Trump protestors who she felt were ignorantly comparing the presidential candidate to Adolf Hitler.
“I make the point that they are demonstrating something they had no knowledge about,” said Peterson, who is originally from Germany. “If you want to do it right, you do it right. You don’t know what you are doing.”
She said she made the salute as a counterprotest to the Nazi comparison. “I make the point that they are demonstrating something they had no knowledge about,” she said.
Perhaps the most widely spread image from a Trump rally that has been tied to Nazi Germany is one taken March 5 by Washington Post reporter Jenna Johnson. At an event in Orlando, Fla., Trump, in a now-common routine with his rally audiences, asked attendees to raise their right hands and repeat a “pledge” that they would vote for him on the appropriate day.
Johnson snapped a shot while it was happening and shared it on Twitter where it has been re-shared more than 11,000 times.
Many people juxtaposed the photo with old images of Hitler and Nazis doing the salute.
A video of Trump reciting the “pledge,” however shows him raising his right hand up at his side, like a scout sign, rather than in front of him and up, like a Nazi salute. In an interview on MSNBC two days later, Trump dismissed the comparison as “a stretch.”
“They’re raising their hand in the form of a vote, not in the form of a salute,” he said. “That is crazy. That is crazy.”
