Donald Trump Jr.'s Skittles-Refugees Metaphor Backfires Big Time

The Donald Trump campaign went into overdrive Monday using the weekend's bombings in New Jersey and New York City — where 29 people were injured but no one killed — to justify its closed-borders policies.

That included a late-night tweet from Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted a picture of a bowl of Skittles that read, "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem."

Accompanying the picture, Trump Jr. tweeted, "This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first. #trump2016"

The backlash was swift, and some of it came from the subject of Trump Jr.'s photo.

"Skittles are candy. Refugees are people," Denise Young, vice president of corporate affairs for Wrigley, which owns Skittles, said in the statement. "We don't feel it's an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing."

Trump Jr.'s timeline was inundated with images of Syrian children and even some references to Nazi Germany.

The bowl of Skittles in question in Trump Jr.'s graphic was taken by David Kittos and posted to his personal Flickr account.

Kittos is a photographer in the UK who came there as a refugee in 1974.

"This was not done with my permission, I don't support his politics and I would never take his money to use it," Kittos told the BBC. "In 1974, when I was six years old, I was a refugee from the Turkish occupation of Cyprus so I would never approve the use of this image against refugees."

So, just how accurate is Trump Jr.'s graphic? Not very, it turns out.

Just last week, the Cato Institute — a libertarian think tank backed by the super conservative Koch brothers — released a report assessing the risk posed to Americans of dying in a terrorist attack at the hands of a refugee in any given year.

From 1979 through 2015, that number was 1 in 3,609,709.

But remember, Trump Jr. had three scary, deadly Skittles. So he'd need a bowl of 10.92 billion Skittles for his metaphor to work.

Vox's graphics team took the data to its logical conclusion:

Donald Trump Jr. is gonna need a bigger bowl.