Candidate’s son:
Donald Trump Jr. compares Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles.
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump Jr. posted a message on Twitter likening Syrian refugees to a bowl of poisoned Skittles.
Seeking to promote his father’s presidential campaign, the younger Trump posted a tweet featuring a bowl of the candy Skittles with a warning.
“If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?” said the tweet on the verified @DonaldTrumpJr handle.
“That’s our Syrian refugee problem,” said the post, which caused a stir and negative tweets on the Internet into Tuesday.
Trump Jr.’s tweet said, “This image says it all. Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first.”
His father has advocated sharply restraining immigration and has accused opponent Hillary Clinton of advocating acceptance of tens of thousands of refugees.
Skittles’ parent company, Wrigley Americas, distanced itself from the tweet with a terse response opposing Trump Jr.’s premise.
“Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy,” Vice President of Corporate Affairs Denise Young said in the statement. “We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing.”
When former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was running for the Republican presidential nomination last year, he used peanuts to warn about the risk of admitting refugees. In a Nov. 17 interview he asked, if there was a 5-pound bag of peanuts and “there were about 10 peanuts that were deadly poisonous, would you feed them to your kids? The answer is no.”
Trump Jr. has been generating some controversy lately. Last week, he made what some took as a Holocaust-themed joke in a radio interview, referring to “warming up the gas chamber.” He has denied he was alluding to the Holocaust.