Political meme warrior Donald Trump Jr. sent leftists into a rage Monday night by comparing potential terrorists among Syrian refugees to poisonous Skittles.
“If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?” he wrote on Twitter. “That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”
The post created an uproar, and quickly became the number one trend on Twitter.
“This is disgusting,” Hillary Clinton’s traveling press secretary replied on Twitter.
“Did this dude just compare refugees to candy or did someone slip something in my la croix?” asked Addisu Demissie, Hillary Clinton’s National Voter Outreach & Mobilization Director, calling it a “disgusting mess of xenophobia and prejudice.”
“Thankful my grandfather was allowed into this country and not compared to a poisonous skittle,” wrote Josh Schwerin, a national spokesman for Hillary Clinton.
“Who raised this kid?” asked Teddy Goff, a digital strategist for Clinton
By Tuesday morning, all of the major cable news networks were discussing the story, as bewildered anchors and pundits tried to make sense of it.
“Oh my G…” muttered Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski just hours after she met with Donald Trump at Trump Tower with Joe Scarborough.
“It was the campaign, and at the bottom, that was an official product,” Nicole Wallace, a former McCain senior adviser noted helplessly. “That was not a retweet but a product of the campaign. “
The company that makes Skittles responded in a statement.
“Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing,” wrote Denise Young, the Vice President of Corporate Affairs for Wrigley Americas wrote in a statement to Seth Abramovitch, a writer for the Hollywood Reporter.
Trump’s son has a history of triggering leftists using his social media account.
After he shared a supporter’s meme featuring a group of Deplorables including the cartoon frog Pepe, Donald Trump Jr. unleashed a torrent of hate and media criticism including a rebuke from the Hillary Clinton campaign accusing him of being anti-Semitic.