Promoting a white nationalist agenda

“You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

— President Donald Trump on the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

Aug. 15, 2017

From the moment he glided down an escalator to announce his presidential bid in June 2015, Trump ran a campaign that electrified white nationalists who saw in him a kindred spirit – a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.

Trump already had a long and well-documented history of racist comments and acts, including his real estate company’s discriminatory treatment of black people in the 1970s and his later characterization of them as lazy. He had catapulted himself onto the political scene, in fact, as a leader of the “birther” movement – a purveyor of the falsehood that Obama was not a U.S. citizen but rather a Kenyan by birth.

True to form, during his announcement speech, he described Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” The campaign that followed was the most xenophobic and racist by a major party nominee in modern U.S. history. He called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He claimed a U.S.-born Latino judge in one of his civil cases couldn’t be impartial because he was “Mexican.” He got into a verbal war with the Muslim-American parents of a fallen Army captain.

As president, Trump has done nothing to dispel the faith that white nationalists placed in him. Instead, he has reinforced it at virtually every turn.

While his predecessor took many actions to expand civil rights protections and the enforcement of those rights, Trump’s words and actions have invigorated a deeply racist, misogynistic movement that opposes equal rights for those who aren’t what they consider white.

From the earliest days of his administration, Trump installed a handful of key advisers who were closer to the radical right than to the mainstream. Stephen Bannon, who bragged about turning Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right” under his leadership, had Trump’s ear as chief strategist until his departure in late August.



Violence at the rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

Sebastian Gorka, a man who associated with neo-Nazis in his native Hungary, served as an adviser until late August. And Trump’s senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, was a one-time acolyte of anti-Muslim extremist David Horowitz and a close ally of anti-immigrant hate groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

When a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in deadly violence in August, it took two days for Trump to denounce the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. Then, during a contentious exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Aug. 15, Trump claimed there were “some very fine people” among the neo-Nazis marching with torches in Charlottesville.

Days later, Trump lamented the loss of “beautiful statues and monuments” that honor Confederate heroes such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose statue was the focus of the Charlottesville demonstration. Trump equated Confederate commanders with Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves.

The president’s remarks about Charlottesville were praised by former Klan chief David Duke, who attended the rally. “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” he tweeted. Earlier, Duke had spoken at the rally, proclaiming, “We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

Later that month, the racism at the core of Trump’s agenda was laid bare when he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was awaiting a prison sentence for defying a court order that barred him from racially profiling Latinos. As a result of the Aug. 25 pardon, Arpaio, who rose to national prominence for his anti-immigrant tactics in Maricopa County, will never be held accountable for his years of unconstitutional conduct. Trump’s pardon sent an unmistakable message: The president of the United States had the backs of officials engaging in illegal, anti-immigrant crusades.

Despite the demands of the presidency, Trump also routinely found time to verbally attack and denigrate black athletes in 2017, even withdrawing a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors after the team’s superstar point guard, Stephen Curry, who is black, suggested he wouldn’t attend.

Trump railed against NFL players, approximately 70 percent of whom are black, for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans. During a rally in Alabama, he called on NFL team owners – an overwhelmingly white group – to take action against kneeling players.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, they say get that son of a bitch off the field right now – he’s fired! Fired!” Trump said. “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage.”

In January, during a meeting with members of Congress, he questioned why the country accepted immigrants from the supposedly “shithole countries” of Africa and said he preferred immigrants from countries like Norway.