MSNBC columnist draws direct line between Trump posts and KKK's 'Fiery Cross' newspaper

Travis Gettys
August 15, 2024 

A Ku Klux Klan member during a 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia(AFP)

Donald Trump's campaign is using "racist" imagery that differs little from the hateful propaganda pushed out by the Ku Klux Klan, according to a new analysis.

The Trump War Room account run by his campaign shared a racially charged post on X that suggested Kamala Harris, if elected, would flood suburban neighborhoods with hordes of Black and brown immigrants. MSNBC columnist Ja'han Jones drew a direct line between that content and imagery used by the KKK.

“'Import the third world/become the third world,' the tweet read, contrasting an image of a serene suburban neighborhood (in which no people are visible) with a photo depicting a huddled mass of mostly Black men crowded together on a city sidewalk," Jones wrote. "The essence of this tweet — that Black people, perhaps Black immigrants in particular, ought to be feared and rejected — is so grotesque and old-timey in its racism that it harks back to an era when such imagery was commonplace in mainstream American politics: the Jim Crow era."

Trump supporters have held up signs at his rallies – and the Republican National Convention – calling for "Mass Deportation Now," and the former president has promoted memes that depict Black people with their skin darkened and their features rendered inhuman. Jones said the tactic revives an ugly American strategy from more than a half-century ago in the Ku Klux Klan’s Fiery Cross newspaper.

"The KKK's motto at the time it was sharing these images was literally 'America First,' a phrase Trump and his followers have adopted as their own and used throughout his political career," Jones wrote. "Another ad from the pro-segregation Mothers’ League of Central High School in the 1950s called on voters to reject the historic push to desegregate the school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and support segregationists."

"The Trump War Room post on Tuesday is stoking those same bigoted fears about changing neighborhoods," Jones added, "fears that have never truly gone away, with imagery and rhetoric that are just as blatant as they were a hundred years ago."