Donald Trump Jr. Apologizes For Calling Nazi-Saluting Woman A Bernie Supporter

By Rachel Cromidas in News on Mar 29, 2016 2:35PM

Apologies have been hard to come by during celebrity businessman Donald Trump's run for the White House, which might make it all the more unusual that his son, Donald Trump Jr., recently issued an apology on Twitter for misidentifying the woman who memorably made a Nazi salute outside Trump's aborted Chicago rally as a Bernie Sanders supporter.

He was wrong—the woman wasn't Bernie supporter Portia Boulger, but 69-year-old Birgitt Peterson of Yorkville, Illinois—a fact anyone who reads the news has known for over two weeks now, because she gave an interview about her decision to invoke the Nazi salute to the New York Times.

The apology Tweet, made Monday night, simply blamed "bad info" on Trump Jr.'s false claim. "My apologies," he wrote.

After she was photographed making the universal gesture for fascism outside the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion on March 11, Peterson told reporters that she is absolutely not a Nazi—she just wanted to prove a point after seeing Trump rally protesters holding a poster with a picture of Adolf Hitler. “Absolutely I’m not a Nazi, no,” she told the Times. “I’m not one of those.” The photo, below, nonetheless went viral on social media:

In the wake of the Chicago rally, which Trump's camp cancelled at the last minute due to imagined "safety" concerns, Trump falsely claimed that Bernie Sanders supporters had incited violence. Multiple reports from rally participants and journalists on the ground conflict with those claims, and Chicago Police Department officials have said they did not believe Trump's safety was threatened, should he have appeared at the rally as planned.