Did the Trump Campaign Make a Model Black?

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump hasn’t exactly made nice with every race, gender, and religion represented in the United States. He’s tangled with Hispanics, Muslims, women, and more. So the fact that the candidate’s shop on DonaldTrump.com, which sells T-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, and more with his “Make America Great Again” slogan, is at the center of a racial scandal isn’t all that surprising. In an effort to include more diversity on the site, it seems that a digital retoucher has darkened a model’s light skin.

As Eric Ming, the digital director for the U.S. Senate campaign website of Maryland Rep. Donna Edwards, pointed out, the individual wearing the Trump campaign women’s short-sleeve V-neck T-shirt in gray, which is on sale for $22, has been drastically altered. The shirt, made in the USA by JCG Apparel, is shown on jgcapparel.com being worn by a Caucasian woman. This image, based on a comparison of the websites, appears to be the exact same one the Trump campaign employs. RawStory.com even placed the two images on top of each other and found that the collarbones matched.

“Not even a good Photoshop, too :/ the brown skin is so flat and featureless, barely any shadows,” Haru Bell wrote on Twitter. Others cracked jokes, saying that the retouched model isn’t brown, it’s orange, to match Trump’s widely mocked, spray-tanned skin.

Yahoo Style has reached out to Trump for comment and will update when we hear back. This scandal comes at a regrettable time for the GOP frontrunner, who recently came under fire for initially refusing to denounce former KKK grand wizard David Duke after CNN’s Jake Tapper asked if the real estate developer would denounce the leader and various other white supremacist groups supporting the campaign. While he later did an about-face (“David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years,” Trump said on Thursday), his campaign’s history with black individuals has been rife with controversy. Just last week, a group of black students were thrown out of a rally in Georgia. Additionally, a young black girl was assaulted at a Super Tuesday event in Kentucky.

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