Once again Donald Trump has requested that his rally audience pledge loyalty to him, personally—resulting once again in images that a great many people find disturbing.
Donald Trump on Monday again asked supporters at a rally to pledge their support to the GOP presidential candidate by raising their right hand amid suggestions from critics that the gesture resembles the "Heil Hitler" salute. [...]
"Should we do the pledge? Should we do the pledge?" Trump asked supporters. "Raise your hand: 'I swear I'm going to vote for Donald Trump next week, I swear.'"
Among those "critics:” Former Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman, who calls Trump's actions deliberate.
“As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, to see an audience of thousands of people raising their hands in what looks like the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute is about as offensive, obnoxious and disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America,” he told The Times of Israel. [...]
“It is a fascist gesture,” Foxman said. “He is smart enough — he always tells us how smart he is — to know the images that this evokes. Instead of asking his audience to pledge allegiance to the United States of America, which in itself would be a little bizarre, he’s asking them to swear allegiance to him.”
Furthermore, Foxman added, “He even threatens that if they don’t, they will suffer and be punished. This is so over the top for a man who really doesn’t come out of the underground. He is a man of the world. Even though he proclaims he doesn’t know who David Duke was, or the other white supremacists, we know very well that he knows. So he’s playing to an image.”
There's no way Trump didn't know how the photos of his last, identical "pledge" were received. So yes, it's safe to say this time around it was a deliberate act.