For the past two days Donald Trump has been letting his surrogates like Corey Lewandowski and Jeffrey Lord float the ludicrous excuse that the Star of David graphic in that antisemitic image he tweeted was a completely innocent “sheriff’s star” that had nothing to do with antisemitism.

This is despite the fact that it’s now proven to have been created by a racist alt-right antisemite, and was posted weeks before Trump’s tweet at a message board for neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

This morning, after ignoring the issue all weekend, Trump picked up that insultingly stupid “sheriff’s badge” excuse from his lackeys and parroted it himself on Twitter.

Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff’s Star, or plain star!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2016

If this was just an innocent geometric shape devoid of any meaning, why did Trump delete the original tweet and replace it two hours later with a hastily edited version of the same graphic with a circle in place of the star?

Also, why did someone delete or crop out the original creator’s Twitter handle from the image Trump tweeted — if not to conceal its origin? Here’s a comparison, with Trump’s edited image on the left, and the original on the right:

As we’ve pointed out many times here at LGF, Trump has a long history of retweeting and associating with extremists of all kinds. Without this context it might be possible to accept this antisemitic image as a simple unforced error. With the context… no way.

It’s clear this is and has been a deliberate strategy for Trump all along, to pander to the most extreme elements of the right wing base in a sleazy, semi-hidden way that he can then deny when called out.

And the only people falling for this any more are his own followers.