Donald Trump Jr. just made a Holocaust joke while attacking Hillary Clinton and the media

Impact

Donald Trump Jr. just can't seem to keep his foot from his mouth.

In a radio interview on Wednesday, Trump made a Holocaust reference while trying to make the argument that the media has propped up Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

"Without the media, this wouldn't even be a contest, but the media has built her up. They've let he slide on every indiscrepancy, on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing," Trump Jr. said in an interview with Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT. "If Republicans were doing that, they'd be warming up the gas chamber right now."

Trump Jr. explained to MSNBC's Katy Tur that he was referencing "corporal punishment," not the Holocaust, with his "warming up the gas chamber" remark.

Still, it's hard to see how the phrase "warming up the gas chamber" is not a reference to the Holocaust, when millions of Jews, members of LGBTQ communities and other political dissidents were killed en masse in gas chambers in concentration camps run by the Nazis.

Trump Jr.'s comments come as the Trump campaign has come under fire for harboring racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic supporters — whom Clinton called a "basket of deplorables."

After Clinton's comments, Trump Jr. tweeted an image of Trump's top campaign surrogates, among them "Pepe the Frog" — a symbol of the white-supremacist alt-right.