Fact Check

Trump Haters and Trump Supporters

Photographs that purportedly show the difference between "Trump haters" and "Trump supporters" are misleading.

Published May 30, 2016

 (Reuters)
Image Via Reuters
Claim:
An image shows a group of Trump haters waving only foreign flags, and a group of Trump supporters waving American flags.

In May 2016, an image purportedly showing a group of "Trump haters" waving foreign flags and a group of "Trump supporters" waving American flags appeared on social media, mostly shared by several pro-Donald Trump groups. But at least one of the images provided in the meme is completely unrelated to the Republican presidential candidate.

The image of "Trump supporters" waving American flags was actually taken in 2011 (long before Trump started his 2016 presidential campaign) as Tennesseans gathered to protect the funeral of Sergeant Kevin Balduf from a Westboro Baptist Church protest:

Flag-wavers-

Hundreds of people showed up today at the funeral of a Nashville Marine, but not to attend the service. Instead, they came to form a counter-protest to a group that has picketed thousands of military funerals across the country.

Twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Kevin Balduf was killed in a fire fight in Afghanistan last month. The Westboro Baptist Church, a Kansas fundamentalist group, came out to protest the funeral. Friends of the marine started an internet campaign to form a protective shield outside the funeral.

The image showing "Trump haters" was taken on 27 May 2016 at a Trump protest in San Diego, California. The image appeared on the web site Fire Andrea Mitchell under the title "Leftist Thugs Protest Trump in San Diego, Can You Find an American Flag?" The web site then provided three images of the protest in which no American flags were supposedly visible.

If the captioner had looked a little harder, however, they might have found several images from that same San Diego protest in which those protesting Trump's appearance were captured waving American flags:

trump hater flags

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.