The campaign for former U.S. President Donald Trump is still actively fundraising even though the 2020 election has come and gone. That includes a July 26, 2021, email to supporters offering a "Trump card," which is a red card containing gold images and lettering that includes Trump's signature.
The story was first reported by Insider on Aug. 4, 2021, which explained that the card design was one of four that supporters were asked to choose from in a fundraising email. The design with the most votes would, in theory, end up being the official one.
One of the cards containing an emblazoned gold eagle prompted some to compare the symbol to Nazi imagery:
Some also mocked the card, noting that one of the designs included a misspelling of "official" as "offical":
We reached out to Trump's team asking what the significance of the eagle on the card was, and will update this story if we get a response.
Trump has at various times during his 2016 campaign and presidency been publicly accused of both racism and cozying up to right-wing extremists, or failing to sufficiently distance himself from them.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a nonprofit watchdog organization that tracks hate and extremism, the Nazis, in the lead-up to and during World War II, did use an eagle symbol. According to the ADL it looked like this:
Nevertheless, the ADL notes that the eagle has long been a common symbol used in national and other kinds of imagery not necessarily associated with Nazism:
It should be noted that eagles are a common symbol among nations worldwide, including the United States, and not every image of an eagle is derivative of the Nazi eagle. It is not uncommon, for example, for some Americans to mistake the Blue Eagle logo of the Roosevelt-era National Recovery Administration for a Nazi-derived symbol.