USA: Controversy over conservative radio host's Nazi-like salute at the close of her RNC speech

Jeremy Stahl, a senior editor at the website Slate.com, has re-posted photographs tweeted from last week’s Republican National Convention in Ohio. In the photos, the talk radio host Laura Ingraham is shown raising and straightening her right arm in profile toward the very large screen from which candidate Donald Trump was remotely addressing the convention. Video footage shows that the moment was preceded and followed by Ingraham making different gestures as well.

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A zoomed-out photo of the controversial moment shows Trump seeming to respond to her gesture by waving his right arm.

Many photographs of Democratic Party speakers also raising their right arms during public presentations have since been circulated online by those arguing that Ingraham’s gesture should not be read as resembling a Nazi salute. Trump’s social media ties to white supremacists, however, have been reported on by Fortune magazine and have probably paved the way for Ingraham’s gesture to be interpreted as playing with the Nazi image.

Ingraham is a best-selling author and television commentator whose nationally syndicated talk show is broadcast on radio throughout the United States. Newsmax magazine, a conservative publication, called her one of the 25 most influential women in the Republican Party in 2013.

The talk show host published a book about Hillary Clinton in the year 2000 called The Hillary Trap: Looking for Power in All the Wrong Places. In it, according to Wikipedia, she argues that Clinton’s allegedly “liberal feminism has created a culture that rewards dependency, encourages fragmentation, undermines families, and celebrates victimhood”.