UPDATED: Donald Trump Jr. tastes the wrath of Skittles after posting anti-refugee meme
We always suspected that Skittles leaned liberal—you don’t get a slogan like “taste the rainbow” without an open mind, and maybe a couple of Grateful Dead shows—but that’s now been confirmed as Mashable brings the full story behind why jokes about Skittles kept popping up in your Twitter feed last night. Apparently, the whole thing started when Donald Trump Jr. took a break from drafting his 28th Amendment proposal yesterday to tweet out the following thought exercise:
Aside from the documented fact that the average American’s risk of being killed in a terrorist attack perpetuated by a refugee is 1 in 3.64 billion per year—meaning we’re talking more of a Scrooge McDuck vault full of Skittles than a bowl in this analogy—there’s a logical flaw here so basic, even a person high enough to taste rainbows can understand it. As a rep for Skittles’ parent company Wrigley America puts it:
Not only that, but it seems the Trump campaign didn’t even invent this particular logical fallacy of a meme. Mashable cites examples going back to 2014, some of which use M&M’s instead of Skittles for added metaphorical weight. In fact, this exact comparison was made back in August by Illinois congressman-turned-right-wing radio host Joe Walsh (not to be mistaken for “Clown Prince of Rock” Joe Walsh, although the nickname could easily apply), who decided to switch things up from his usual aggressive anti-Muslim rhetoric and get passive-aggressive for once:
UPDATE: The irony in this situation just keeps getting more delicious, as David Kittos, the British photographer who took the picture of the now-infamous bowl of Skittles in Trump Jr.’s tweet, has come forward to say that he himself was forced to flee his homeland of Cyprus as a child. “This was not done with my permission, I don’t support his politics and I would never take his money to use it,” Kittos tells the BBC. “In 1974, when I was six years old, I was a refugee from the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, so I would never approve the use of this image against refugees.”
Kittos says he “isn’t sure [he has] the patience” to sue Trump over the image—probably a good call, as Trump is known for legal tactics somewhat akin to medieval siege warfare—but he would like the campaign to stop using it. We’ll see if they listen.