How White Nationalists Learned To Love Donald Trump

The embrace of Donald Trump by America’s white nationalists has been one of the most surprising and unsettling threads in the 2016 campaign. The celebrity New York developer has been endorsed by the nation’s most prominent neo-Nazis, as well as both current and former Klansmen. He is supported online by a legion of racist and anti-Semitic trolls, who push his campaign’s message and viciously attack journalists and politicians they see as hostile to Trump. Whether deliberately or not, the candidate, his son Donald Jr. and his surrogates have circulated white nationalist messages and imagery online. The Republican National Committee even displayed a white nationalist’s tweet during the GOP convention.

But not long ago, even an accidental alliance between Trump and white nationalists would have seemed utterly unlikely. Far from being a hero, Trump for years was reviled by such groups. Even after years of championing racially tinged questions about President Barack Obama’s birthplace, he was viewed with disdain and suspicion in the white nationalist community as recently as 2015. Many claimed the New Yorker was secretly Jewish, or in thrall to Jewish interests; others saw him as a blowhard and egomaniac, a mercenary who was in it only for himself. On web forums, blogs and online radio shows, they complained about his highly visible associations with “non-whites” in his reality shows and his beauty pageants.

What happened? How did the scattered legions of American white supremacists coalesce around a showboating New York mogul? I tracked this two-year evolution through thousands of posts and comments on scores of blogs and forums used by the most ideological racists. What these posts show is the story of a U.S. presidential candidate who slowly but relentlessly overcame widespread distrust and contempt, as white nationalists came to believe he was their candidate—or at least the best candidate they could realistically expect.

Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t Trump’s initial campaign announcement about Mexican “rapists” that cemented his support: It was his steady, consistent push for an anti-immigration platform, one of the central policy pillars of the nationalist right. And as white-nationalists began to rally around Trump as its closest political ally in a generation, they began to detect what members called “wink-wink-wink” communications from the candidate. There was his retweet of bogus murder statistics that exaggerated black crime; two separate retweets of a racist Twitter feed called @WhiteGenocideTM; and the interview that sealed the deal: the moment on CNN when—just days before the Louisiana primary—Trump dodged the question of whether to repudiate the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, which one commenter on the white nationalist site Stormfront called “the best political thing I have seen in my life.”

Contacted for this story, Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller strongly denied that the candidate had overtly tried to cozy up to white-power groups. Miller wrote in an e-mail: “We have rejected and rebuked any groups and individuals associated with a message of hate and will continue to do so. We have never intentionally engaged directly or indirectly with such groups and have no intention of ever doing so, and in fact, we’ve gone a step further and said that we don’t want votes from people who think this way.”

Whether the white nationalist community’s embrace of Trump was the result of a conscious strategy on the campaign’s part, some sort of accident or something in between, it led to a show of unified support unprecedented for a modern major-party nominee. Even as Trump supporters argue that the candidate isn’t a racist, when it comes to the white-power movement itself, there’s no question how they see it: More than in any other modern presidential campaign, they believe they’re receiving clear and frequent signals of support.

The groups I tracked are not the freewheeling hate communities of reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, or even the so-called “alt-right.” They are the inheritors and upholders of older strains of organized white nationalism, including neo-Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity (a Christianized version of white supremacy) and so-called “race realism,” whose adherents believe there are scientific justifications for racism. These are not bored teenagers making trouble or newcomers to the movement. They are committed ideologues who have thought out and articulated their views, often over the course of many years.

The convergence of white nationalists around a mainstream candidate marks a major development in the post-Civil Rights Act era of American politics. While they have opposed Democrats actively in past elections, their attitudes toward Republican candidates largely have been ambivalent, with many opting out of politics altogether. Now, with Trump, that has changed, raising the prospect that the nominee of a major political party is tapping a deep well of anti-Semitism and racial hate—intentionally or unintentionally—and is mainstreaming such views in the process.

If Trump wins the election, subscribers to those views believe, they will be able to claim increased legitimacy and seek a bigger role in mainstream politics. And even if he loses, as looks more likely, they may be in a better position than ever to claim a stake in future presidential elections—perhaps even to field a candidate of their own four years from now.

White nationalism in the United States is a fractured movement, consisting of many small groups with diverse, competing ideologies. There are at least hundreds of distinct organizations, with tens of thousands of supporters. Many maintain small local chapters, but the national aspect of the movement is mostly represented online, split among a dozen or so influential web sites, plus dozens more online forums for denizens of the alt-right, a less ideologically defined iterationof the same attitudes.

Much of the movement’s online activity is devoted to cataloging grievances and criticisms about various ethnicities, but politics and current events are frequently discussed. For more than a decade before he was a presidential candidate, Trump the businessman and entertainer was an occasional topic on sites like Stormfront, the most prominent English-language white nationalist forum, and the Vanguard News Network Forum (VNN), which skews toward a harsher, neo-Nazi-informed take on white supremacy. Posts about Trump were usually negative in tone, often devoted to complaints about the diversity of the contestants on “The Apprentice” and in the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, then owned by Trump.

Users on the forums mostly saw Trump as annoying or entertaining, but they frequently speculated that he was secretly Jewish, or close enough to Judaism be worthy of hate: In the fevered white nationalist worldview, it’s inconceivable that a New York real estate magnate could make billions of dollars without support from a Jewish financial conspiracy. “Trump is not a Jew, he just wishes he was,” one VNN poster wrote in 2006. In 2009, when Trump’s daughter Ivanka began converting to Judaism, hardcore white nationalists believed their suspicions were confirmed.