The hate that dared not speak its name was in fine voice this week. In a grand Washington townhouse behind the supreme court, the air was thick with talk of what Donald Trump would do for white Americans.



“Everyone says we’re a nation of immigrants but we’re not,” said one man, proudly sporting a Trump T-shirt. “We’re a nation of northern European immigrants. We shouldn’t have to pay more just to live among our own demographic.”



“Absolutely,” agreed the woman next him. “My family go back to the 1680s.”

The party, thrown by Breitbart News, former employer of Trump’s new campaign chief Steve Bannon, was given a further veneer of respectability by an author signing a table full of hardbacks with Latin in the title. Ann Coulter’s new book, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, echoed the racially triumphant mood.

“The same way virtually any immigrant to Finland makes it less white, almost any immigrant to America makes it less honest,” Coulter writes in her 182-page hagiography. “There’s nothing Trump can do that won’t be forgiven. Except change his immigration policies.”

Unfortunately, at the very moment of the book-signing, that was exactly what Trump was doing.

In an interview on Fox News, the struggling Republican candidate dramatically rowed back on his signature pledge to deport undocumented immigrants, seemingly hoping to recapture moderates alarmed by the stridency of what he appears to have unleashed.

The electoral risk posed by Trump’s flirtation with white nationalism was underlined a day later, when Hillary Clinton used links to so-called “alt-right” thinkers to mount her fiercest attack yet.

“The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘alt-right’,” Clinton said. “A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican party. All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before.”

She added: “This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are racist ideas, race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women, all key tenets making up the emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right.”

The speech drew fury from Trump and Breitbart, which accused Clinton of slandering its readers and “label[ing] 31 million people as racists, simply because they don’t agree with her”.

But one need not dig far to find evidence of what Clinton is talking about. Breitbart itself recently claimed the real fascists and racists in America – the true “hate that dares not speak its name” – were the “progressive mob” that “places whites at the bottom of the racial totem pole”.

For critics of the alt-right, the question now is less whether Trump’s backpedalling can save his presidential campaign, but whether the dark forces he has unleashed can ever be put back in the box.

“For white supremacists right now, this is really a moment to cheer,” said Heidi Beirich, of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors hate groups and extremists across the US. “The first conservative media outlet to embrace white nationalism is merging with the Republican campaign.

“The ideas that they are pushing are the same ones that motivate the alt-right – a rebranding of old white nationalism and an attempt to give respectability to ideas that had long been unacceptable in the American mainstream.”

Anti-Trump protesters demonstrate outside a meeting between Donald Trump and minority Republicans at Trump Tower in New York on Thursday. Photograph: Bebeto Matthews/AP

The SPLC claims there has been an alarming increase in violent attacks since Trump began to legitimise what were previously fringe views on immigration and race.

It points to Dylann Roof’s shooting dead of nine black people in a church in Charleston last June, the recent killing of a Muslim cleric in New York and the racially charged murder of a Lebanese man in Oklahoma as examples of what could be to come even if Trump loses.

“There has been a lot of political violence in the last eight years and this might be something that comes up again if Trump is unsuccessful,” said Beirich, in a conference call with reporters.

“We are concerned about domestic terrorism and an organised white nationalist political movement and these are all things that Trump and Steven Bannon have bequeathed us.”

For Trump – who called the Charleston murders “incomprehensible” – these are slurs from a liberal left that is running out of ideas for addressing the bigger challenge: lifting African Americans and legal Latino migrants out of poverty.

“She is a bigot,” he said of Clinton. “She is selling them down the tubes because she’s not doing anything for those communities. She talks a good game. But she doesn’t do anything.”

Coulter, meanwhile, denied she had fallen out with Trump over his rethink on deportation, amid questions over whether it amounts to a rethink at all.



But no amount of back and forth over the question of immigration can disguise the extent to which, for the first time in decades, race is a mainstream political talking point.



In Tennessee recently, an independent candidate for Congress thanked Trump for “loosen[ing] up the overall spectrum of political discourse”. The candidate echoed the presidential campaign slogan with a billboard that read: “Make America White Again.”

Online, prominent alt-right figures happily describe themselves as “American nationalists”, poke fun at the media’s political correctness and accuse Clinton of supporting “Black Panthers who want to murder crackers”.

But Trump’s focus on immigration has arguably raised the temperature offline too. In Virginia, for example, a Latina waitress attracted national attention after she received a racist note instead of a tip. “We only tip citizens,” read the scrawl on the cheque.

Veteran civil rights campaigners think there is no going back for the Trump campaign – only the hope that enough people vote against him to limit his future impact on the national debate.

“He’s afraid his xenophobia, his racism, is going to wreck his chances for the White House,” said Ben Jealous, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pointing to Trump’s history of questioning Obama’s nationality as an example of a long track record.

“But his problems with race are set in stone, there is no going back on it. He’s not going to convince black and brown folks to vote for him.

“The test this fall and the reason we can’t celebrate yet is that Trump is inspiring people on both sides. He’s inspiring black and brown voters to turn out to defend their basic civil rights, but he’s also inspiring the most extremist elements in the white community, many of whom are typically not involved [in electoral politics].

“That’s why this fall will be a showdown for this country, a referendum on whether we are a country prepared to move forward on race or backwards quickly.”