Trump-THE•DONALD•TRUMP Rune #294

THE•DONALD•TRUMP Rune #294

At the just-wrapped Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, headlining speaker Donald Trump made an inflammatory speech from a strange, zig-zagging stage. The speech, of course, drew attention, but it featured largely the kind of content we have grown to expect from the former president. The stage itself, however, drew anger for its shape — identical to that of the Odal or Othala rune, historically used as a Nazi insignia.

There is nothing inherently antisemitic about the basic Othala rune, which indicates an O sound in a Proto-Germanic language; the rune stands for estate, property and inheritance. But the Nazi party employed a variant of the rune with added serifs, or “feet” as the symbol of the SS Race and Settlement Office as well as a division of the Volksdeutsche, a movement of ethnic Germans who lived outside Germany and did not hold German citizenship. It is classified as a hate symbol and a neo-Nazi symbol by the ADL. This version with added feet, which was created by the Nazi party in the 1930s, was used for the CPAC stage.