Tyler Bridges, a freelance writer based in New Orleans, is a former Nieman Fellow and reporter for The Miami Herald and The Times-Picayune. He is the author of The Rise of David Duke and Bad Bet on the Bayou: The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and the Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards.

On a moonlit night 39 years ago outside of San Diego, three sedans sped along back roads to pass on claims of illegal alien sightings to federal border agents. In the lead vehicle was David Duke, the mediagenic grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and attached to his sedan was a white hand-painted sign: “Klan Border Watch.” Trailing Duke were three dozen reporters, photographers and TV cameramen who captured a carefully manufactured scene that resonated with those who feared, then as now, hordes of immigrants illegally crossing into the United States.

Duke made headlines again last month when he cheered on Donald Trump, who is waging his own sensationalist war against immigration. “I do support his candidacy, and I support voting for him as a strategic action,” Duke said on his radio show. “His candidacy is an insurgency that is waking up millions of Americans. It is your job now to get active.” In a CNN interview, Trump at first did not disavow the one-time Klan leader, sparking an even greater round of headlines. (Trump later did on social media.)


I don’t think Trump equivocated over Duke by chance. As Duke’s biographer, I find many echoes of Duke in what Trump says and does, and in their similar appeal to disaffected white voters. As he campaigns for president, Trump demands a wall to keep out the illegal immigrants, just as Duke did during his Klan border watch. Trump rails against Washington and the political elites. He says trade with China kills American jobs. He revels in being politically incorrect—and you can’t be any more politically incorrect than not distancing yourself from Duke as quickly as you can.

As a reporter, I chronicled Duke’s political rise in Louisiana, and I decided to write his biography to explain in detail that the focus by the media and the public with his Klan past obscured his true obsession—combatting Jews who he believes are bent on using blacks and brown-skinned immigrants to undermine the white race. Of course, no one is accusing Trump of harboring such feelings.

But when I saw Trump address 10,000 people at an arena in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a month ago, it brought back memories of the earlier Duke campaigns. “Trump! Trump! Trump!” the nearly-all white crowd chanted repeatedly, many of them on their feet throughout the entire speech. I could feel his supporters’ seething anger, especially when he asked rhetorically who ought to build the wall. “Mexico!” they yelled.

As I walked out, I remarked that I hadn’t seen such fervor for a political candidate since I covered Duke 25 years earlier. Then, I heard similar chants—“Duke! Duke! Duke!”—from white men and women who stomped their feet and punched the air in an us-versus-them atmosphere. “Send them a message,” he said, and they roared with approval.

Back, then, having stowed his white robe, Duke won national attention when he was elected as a legislator to the state House of Representatives from a suburban New Orleans district, followed by campaigns to be a senator and then governor of Louisiana. He ultimately fell short, but he delivered a powerful race-based message that created a mass movement by tapping into the frustration of working-class whites who were angry with the status quo and the political establishment. In the two statewide races, he won an astounding 55 to 60 percent of the white vote.

Today, Duke sees Trump as a kindred spirit. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that I have gotten in Louisiana,” Duke told his listeners. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that [Pat] Buchanan got. He’s getting the same votes as George Wallace.”

Several months before he shocked the Republican Party by running strong in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, Buchanan offered this advice on Duke: “Both the GOP establishment and conservatives should study how and why white voters who delivered Louisiana to Reagan and Bush three times, moved in such numbers to David Duke—and devise a strategic plan to win them back.” Trump seems to have learned that lesson.

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David Duke has become a national symbol of bigotry these days, but during his heyday in Louisiana, Duke became a hero for aggrieved whites, attracting many of the same types of voters—many of them Democrats—who had supported the presidential campaigns of George Wallace in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. The people who voted for Duke when he won the state legislative race in 1989—and then flocked to his bids for the Senate and to be governor—tended to earn less money than the state average, hadn’t graduated from college and felt like Louisiana and the United States were off track.

“Although nominally a Republican, Duke did not win by assembling the pieces of a traditional Republican coalition,” Lawrence Powell, a Tulane historian, wrote in a 1992 study of Duke’s legislative race. “Instead of going from the top down, he built his political base from the bottom up, mixing working-class Democrats with white collarites that he sheared from the lower end of the Republican coalition.”

As a state legislator, Duke received sacks of mail every day from ordinary people across the country. Some letters were simply addressed with nothing more than David Duke/State Capitol. Inside, he often found $5 or $10 donations and a heartfelt request that he keep on fighting for them.

When Duke was stopped for speeding while he raced around the state, not once did a state trooper give him a ticket. “Let me tell you something,” his campaign aide later told me, “those troopers were all for David.”

Trump’s political ascent has left Republican Party leaders aghast. The same thing happened with Duke. When he ran for the Statehouse in 1989, the Republicans’ heaviest guns in Washington blasted away at him as Reagan, President George W. Bush and party chairman Lee Atwater all repudiated Duke. Voters elected him anyway. Many said they didn’t take kindly to outsiders telling them how to vote—similar to the backlash against Mitt Romney for calling Trump a phony and a threat to the Republican Party.

Just as some governors (Hello, Chris Christie) and members of Congress have broken ranks with the party establishment to endorse Trump, most Republicans who served with Duke in the Louisiana House supported his bills. State party leaders and activists killed efforts to censure him for his extremist activities.

Duke’s campaign speeches were happenings—just like Trump’s. While other candidates would have gladly given away anything with their name on it, Duke sold T-shirts and buttons at his events. “He says in public what we all talk about in private,” a rice farmer told me at one Duke rally. I noticed that Trump did a brisk business selling T-shirts and ballcaps at the speech I attended.

After Duke drew 600 people to a rally in one town during the 1990 Senate campaign, I was told that the incumbent he was challenging, Senator J. Bennett Johnston, couldn’t have gotten half of that turnout. “He has turned out to be an outstanding spokesman for the people no one is speaking for,” a state senator from that area told me.

Duke campaigned against higher taxes, out-of-touch government bureaucrats and against what he called “free trade,” which he said benefited Japan and other countries at the expense of American workers. Troops overseas should be sent to seal the border with Mexico, he said. Careful not to utter the N-word, he forcefully attacked affirmative action, minority set-asides and other government programs aimed at helping blacks—a message that hit home with out-of-work whites or those whose incomes were stagnating as Louisiana slowly recovered from the oil bust of the 1980s.

Trump has his own set of boogeymen, beginning with the immigrants from Mexico and Central America. He made his own well-publicized visit to the border in July—he didn’t need a hand-painted sign attached to his vehicle—and following the terrorist attack in Paris called for temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country.

Not surprisingly, reporters have fixated on Duke’s Klan past in their recent coverage. But his guiding light is actually the profound conviction that Jews are using their control or ownership of big media outlets (think of the New York Times and the Newhouse family) to force whites to live, study and work with blacks, who he believes are genetically inferior. When all those folks rub elbows, miscegenation inevitably results, he believes. The white gene pool is weakened. In short, Duke is a neo-Nazi. (No one has accused Trump of harboring such feelings, but he has kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.)

For Trump, the illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico into the United States seem to be an economic issue. Not for Duke. It’s about what he calls “the demographic threat to America,” and he’s convinced Jews are behind it. "When he’s taking on the immigration, the open borders,” Duke said on the radio, “he’s really taking on the Jewish establishment and he’s taking on the neocons who control the Republican Party.”

Duke didn’t publicly discuss his fixation on Jews during his political heyday in Louisiana. Voters wouldn’t get it, he once explained privately. Now a political has-been in Louisiana, having served a stint in federal prison for misusing money from his followers, Duke is openly espousing his anti-Semitic message again.

And Duke sees Trump as a fellow traveler. “The reason we have this incredible destruction of both Europe and America,” he said on the radio, “is because we have an alien race, an alien people who have taken over our countries, taken over our media, taken over our banking, and only Donald Trump of any Republican has spoken up against Wall Street and the Jewish banks like Goldman Sachs.”

During Duke’s political rise, as a reporter for The Times-Picayune newspaper, I reported that he got his political start with the National Socialist White People’s Party and created his own faction of the Klan after graduating from Louisiana State University because he saw the Klan as a way to generate news coverage to get out his white-rights message.

While he ran for the state Senate, I reported that for years he had celebrated Hitler’s birthday (complete with a cake) and had said repeatedly that the Holocaust was a hoax trumped up by Jews to win sympathy. I reported that he sold Mein Kampf and neo-Nazi books out of his legislative office. I even reported that he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and hadn’t paid all of his taxes.

His supporters didn’t care. They accused me and the Times-Picayune of being part of the liberal political establishment.

During the 1990 Senate campaign, campaign staffers for Johnston thought they would sink Duke with an ad that showed footage of him raising a stiff left arm in a “white power” salute, as he stood before a burning cross while leading a Klan rally in the late 1970s. The television ad caused Duke to drop 6 points in a Johnston campaign poll, but he rebounded a week later.

I was reminded of this when Trump belittled Senator John McCain, a disabled reporter, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, Muslims and even Pope Francis—and yet went on to win smashing victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and, most recently, Michigan and Mississippi.

I wanted to ask Duke for his thoughts on Trump. But he hung up on me as soon as I called him. No big surprise. He had called me a “sleazebag” in his autobiography.

After Duke’s election to the Louisiana House in 1989, novelist Walker Percy offered this insightful perspective to the New York Times. “If I had anything to say to people outside the state,” Percy said, “I’d tell them, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.”

Donald Trump has disavowed Duke. But in important ways he still acts and sounds like him.