Donald Trump used an alt-right Frozen meme to defend his other Star of David meme

To defend his use of anti-Semitic stereotypes in an attack on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump turned to an unlikely source: the hit Disney movie Frozen.

On Saturday, Trump’s campaign shared a meme charging Hillary Clinton as the “most corrupt candidate ever,” featuring a Star of David on a background of dollar bills.

Trump’s team deleted the tweet, replaced it with one that didn’t have the Star of David on it, and said it “was not created by the campaign nor was it sourced from an anti-Semitic site.”

“It was lifted from an anti-Hillary Twitter user where countless images appear,” the statement said. The meme originally came from an “alt-right” and heavily anti-Semitic 8Chan forum, /pol/, Mic’s Anthony Smith reported, and the “anti-Hillary Twitter user” the campaign cited has a history of tweeting anti-Semitic content.

But Trump can’t seem to let the matter go. On Wednesday, he said deleting the tweet was a mistake — he said he “would rather have defended it” — and offered a new defense: Disney uses the Star of David, so why can’t he?

The meme wasn’t controversial just because it used a Star of David, like this Frozen sticker book cover does, but specifically because the Star of David was on a bed of money.

But the importance of this controversy is not to label Trump as personally anti-Semitic – he has strong ties to the Jewish faith, namely his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Rather, the controversy is yet another sign of how the carelessness in Trump’s campaign can and does give a platform to his followers who share anti-Semitic sentiments.

Even the Frozen reference was taken from a Twitter user who’s part of the alt-right movement.

We know Trump has many anti-Semitic followers and has been slow to denounce them. This meme is certainly not the first time the Trump campaign’s lack of review or response has allowed for the spread of vitriol. (Remember his former butler who called for President Barack Obama to be shot, or when the campaign accidentally picked a white nationalist delegate to represent Trump in California, or when former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke offered to be his vice president?)

Even with Disney as his defense, Clinton had her Frozen response ready:

Correction: The headline has been changed to better reflect the origins of the Frozen meme.