J.M. Berger is associate fellow at the International Center for Counterterrorism at The Hague, and fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

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 iteration of 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.

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.

That began to change as Trump became more outspoken on political issues, particularly immigration. When Arizona passed a controversial immigration law (S.B. 1070) in 2010, Trump went on CNN and told Larry King that the state had deteriorated into a violent lawless nightmare. “Arizona is getting crime-ridden,” Trump said. “There's killings all over the place, shootings all over the place.” White nationalists on grassroots message boards took notice, but their respect was grudging at best. “Donald is an ass on SO many things, but he's got THIS one right,” one Stormfront poster commented in response to the CNN clip.

As Trump launched his campaign to question President Obama’s American citizenship in 2011, qualified respect gave way to mild admiration. But the “Jewish” conspiracy theory persisted. One Stormfront poster who gave Trump credit for his “birther” campaign also wrote, “I will say this though isn't it piss poor pathetic that we have a negro president being called out by a White man who wishes he was born a jew?” Stormfronters debated whether Trump was sincere in his birtherism; some said he was a Jewish plant, intended to deceive gullible white nationalists into supporting him, or just to make them look like idiots by association.

In the following years, it became clear Trump was holding his ground on immigration and Obama, not just exploiting a momentary opportunity for publicity. In October 2014, Trump—foreshadowing his presidential campaign—asserted that there was “something wrong” with Obama’s mental health based on the president’s response to the Ebola crisis. “Why won’t he stop the flights. Psycho!” Trump tweeted. Grassroots white nationalists liked that. “Trump for president,” one Stormfront poster wrote in response.

***

Announcing his candidacy at Trump Tower in June 2015, Trump memorably said illegal Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” With that line, he threw red meat to the white nationalist crowd from the very start of his presidential campaign, but it would take some time for that crowd to believe that Trump was sincere in his rhetoric.

Commenters on more extreme sites like VNN still largely dismissed Trump as a “Jew-snuggler” and an “asshole.” And on Stormfront, reactions were ambivalent.

“He has enough money to avoid the jews manipulators trying to buy him, like the rest of the GOP,” one Stormfront poster wrote.

When he announced his candidacy at Trump Tower in June 2015, Trump threw red meat to white nationalists when he warned of the need for stronger border controls, calling illegal Mexican immigrants "rapists." | AP Photo

“Trump is about Trump and nothing else. He likes the spotlight to be on him. I can't stand the guy,” said another.

“Who would vote for this asshat?” wrote a third (who would, before long, profess to become one of those voters).

A handful of America’s racist thought leaders took note of Trump’s entry into the race. Brad Griffin, who writes under the pen name Hunter Wallace on the white nationalist website Occidental Dissent, said that while Trump couldn’t win, he hoped the candidate would “inflict a lot of damage” on establishment Republican candidates, a sentiment echoed in comments around the wider white nationalist Internet. For years, white nationalists have harbored deep resentments against mainstream Republicans—sometimes reluctantly supporting them against Democrats as the lesser of two evils, but often reproaching them for selling out “conservative” values to “political correctness.” In early 2015, white nationalists coined a term for this phenomenon: “cuckservative,” a racially tinged portmanteau of cuckold and conservative that soared to prominence just as Trump’s campaign was getting off the ground.

Within days of his announcement, though, white nationalists’ lingering fears about Trump’s sincerity seemed to be confirmed when he said he supported the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol in South Carolina, in the wake of the deadly shooting of nine parishioners at a black church in Charleston. Many Stormfronters lashed out. “Trump is a populist: thats how he has made his fortune by tapping into what is popular and what sells,” one wrote. “I wouldn't pin your hopes for the USA on this man; he is a charlatan.”

But others were already adopting an alternative view giving Trump more leeway: that the candidate would have to engage in a certain amount of appeasement regarding hot-button issues in order to get elected. “I don't like it. But there's no perfect candidate,” another Stormfront poster wrote. “But let's look at this politically. Could you imagine the crap storm that would happen if he didn't take this position?”

The first white nationalist leader to formally endorse Trump appears to have been Andrew Anglin, an avid online activist who came up through the racist depths of the alt-right, via the 4chan forum, to found a popular neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer. In late June 2015, Anglin wrote that he didn’t think Trump could ever beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. But he saw reason for hope in Trump’s rising poll numbers. “I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President,” Anglin wrote in June. The post received 2,400 Facebook likes and generated more than 50 comments, far more engagement than a typical Stormer post. By early July, Anglin was optimistic about a victory: “If The Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.”

If The Donald gets the nomination, he will almost certainly beat Hillary, as White men such as you and I go out and vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.”

July was a critical month in solidifying white nationalist support for Trump, as proliferating threads and blog posts addressed the question of whether he could be trusted on policy. On the campaign trail, Trump was burning his way through his establishment Republican challengers, to the delight of white nationalists. “Cuckservative” began trending on Twitter. Trump refused to back down from his controversial remarks about Hispanics, winning plaudits from white nationalists for his defiance of “political correctness” in the face of criticism from business partners and fellow Republicans.

Trump was surging in the polls “because he is not on his knees before Mexico and Mexican immigrants,” said Jared Taylor of the influential white nationalist website American Renaissance, which under the guise of “race realism” attempts to put an intellectual face on white nationalism. “Americans, real Americans, have been dreaming of a candidate who says the obvious, that illegal immigrants from Mexico are a low-rent bunch that includes rapists and murderers.”

Lengthy debates continued through the summer, during which a new line of argument began to emerge: Trump was the closest thing to a white nationalist candidate in years, many commenters asserted. Even if he was insincere (Trump’s boast about being a friend to Israel, for instance, sowed doubt in the white nationalist community), there was little for them to lose by supporting him. “We White Nationalists should support him even if we KNOW, SUSPECT, OR BELIEVE he is lying, as long as, and ONLY as long as, he continues to attack the left on the issue of immigration,” wrote a member of the active but less-prominent White News Now message board.

Kevin MacDonald, a former California State psychology professor dubbed “the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was even more confident. Win or lose, Trump could pave the way for a white nationalist political renaissance, MacDonald wrote in a widely discussed article on his Occidental Observer blog in July. To white nationalists, Trump was proving that a politician could touch their community’s third rail—“Jewish identity” (in MacDonald’s words)—and survive.

As some mainstream commentators began to argue, Trump was also making overt discussions of white nationalism more acceptable in mainstream politics. This was reflected in an early wave of outside media reports that noted white nationalists’ budding enthusiasm for the candidate. The coverage itself was a boon to the movement, whose leaders were unaccustomed to seeing their names and issues in the news. Traffic to white nationalist web sites began to surge. In December, shortly after Trump announced a proposed ban on Muslim immigration that lit up the message boards yet again, Stormfront founder and administrator Don Black told Business Insider that the Trump phenomenon had been driving substantial traffic to Stormfront, necessitating additional servers. “I’m a little surprised myself,” he said. “I can’t believe that I really like Trump.”

***

As white nationalists more or less accepted Trump as a fellow traveler, someone who shared their bigotry, another question emerged: Would Trump accept them?

At first, there were only tenuous reasons to think Trump was even aware of the white nationalist debate over his suitability for their cause. In July 2015, Trump had tweeted an image showing a stock photo of Nazi S.S. soldiers where American soldiers should have been. The Trump campaign blamed an intern for the mistake, and the incident faded quickly from the mainstream press. But white nationalist observers saw something different.

“Obviously, most people will be like ‘obvious accident, no harm done,’” Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer. “Meanwhile, we here at the Daily Stormer will be all like ‘wink wink wink wink wink.’”

This would soon become a pattern: Trump would promulgate messages with racist cues (some more subtle, some less so), then deny or disavow them, while the white nationalist community dutifully perked up and saw those messages as a call to arms.

In November, for example, the candidate retweeted a graphic showing false statistics vastly exaggerating black crime. White nationalists responded enthusiastically, even as they themselves acknowledged the statistics were false. The graphic was later traced back to a white nationalist on Twitter. Trump lamely deflected criticism from Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly by arguing, essentially, that retweets are not endorsements. “I retweeted somebody who was supposedly an expert,” Trump said. “Am I going to check every statistic?”

In response, the VNN poster who had dismissed Trump as an “Jew-snuggler” and “asshole” in June wrote, “i am starting to like this guy. trump for prez....” A Stormfront poster wrote, “It appears Donald is taking the nuclear option against Political Correctness. I'm loving it!” A thread was started on Stormfront called “I believe in Donald Trump - so should YOU!”

Some white nationalists went so far as to goad the candidate into sending racist signals. In late 2015, a social media campaign called The White Genocide Project began directing tweets to the candidate over Twitter. Bob Whitaker, a racist meme-maker who for a time was the official presidential candidate of the white nationalist American Freedom Party, had worked for years to popularize the phrase “white genocide” as a meme online, by posting it on various forums and eventually taking his marketing-style campaign to Twitter. In late January, Trump took the bait, retweeting a message that had been directed to him from a user with the handle “@WhiteGenocideTM.” While the content of the tweet was relatively innocuous (a light jab at Jeb Bush), the user’s account was filled with anti-Semitic content and linked to a revisionist biography of Adolf Hitler.

Now, white nationalists felt they had a much more overt nod from Trump to justify their cautious enthusiasm. Within a few days, Trump retweeted @WhiteGenocideTM a second time, and two more “white genocide”-oriented users soon after that. (The campaign did not respond to media requests for comment on the tweets at the time.)

"@WhiteGenocideTM: @realDonaldTrump Poor Jeb. I could've sworn I saw him outside Trump Tower the other day! https://t.co/e5uLRubqla" — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016

It was a game-changer. Multiple threads of conversation sprang up across the white nationalist Internet, with a single thread on Stormfront exceeding 900 posts. While some posters were worried that the backlash to Trump’s tweets would have a negative effect on his campaign, others were thrilled. Multiple Stormfront users accelerated their campaign to tweet “white genocide” content at Trump.

“He willingly retweeted the name. The name was chosen to raise awareness of our plight. He helped propagate it. We should be grateful,” one Stormfront member wrote.

“This is the best thing ever! If this gets any play in the media, it gives us an opening to discuss the issue of white genocide with friends and family that we may have been too uncomfortable to discuss with before. This could be an opportunity to wake a whole lot of people up, which frankly is far more important than any presidential candidacy anyway,” wrote another.

Doubters remained, but they were increasingly outnumbered and outshouted.

He willingly retweeted the name. The name was chosen to raise awareness of our plight. He helped propagate it. We should be grateful,” one Stormfront member wrote.

“Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence,” wrote Daily Stormer’s Anglin. “It could only be deliberate. There is no way that this could be anything other than both a wink-wink-wink and a call for more publicity on his campaign.”

***

As the 2016 primaries got underway, white nationalists watched to see which leaders in the community would step forward to endorse, and even campaign for, Trump.

In January, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, an early supporter, lent his voice to robocalls to voters in Iowa, articulating a racial argument for Trump. The calls were funded by the white nationalist American National Super PAC. The Trump campaign refused to comment to CNN about the calls, saying only that Trump, who professed misleadingly to be “self-funding” his campaign, “has disavowed all Super PACs offering their support and continues to do so.”

Also featured on the call was William Johnson, chairman of the American Freedom Party. This was striking, considering that the tiny party was then still fielding Bob Whitaker as its candidate. But even followers of the Whitaker campaign’s Twitter account were tweeting almost exclusively in support of Trump, recognizing the fanciful nature of AFP’s effort. (Whitaker cut ties with the party a few months later, halfheartedly continuing his own campaign and speaking ambivalently about Trump while pledging to run again in 2020.)

On February 10, the day after Trump’s New Hampshire primary victory, he earned an important vote of support from another white nationalist leader, Richard B. Spencer, the godfather of the alt-right movement. Spencer had previously praised the racist undercurrents of Trump’s policies. Now, he declared, “Jews didn’t win this time.” “There is no way,” Spencer said soon afterward, that Trump could have grown up in New York and be “blissfully unaware” of “Jewish power in America.” He believed Trump was trying subtly to acknowledge a conspiracy. “There are these moments with Trump where he’s half-saying something, he’s half-indicating a greater truth.”

All through 2015 and early 2016, the biggest holdout was David Duke, perhaps the most prominent leader of white nationalism in the United States. Duke agreed with many fellow white nationalists that Trump’s stand on immigration created openings for them to advance their arguments, and he admired Trump’s disruption of the loathed Republican establishment. But in his regular online audio programs, Duke had argued that Trump was simply saying whatever he needed to say in order to get elected.

In December, Duke co-hosted an audio program with Kevin MacDonald about the question “Is Donald Trump the Great White Hope?” MacDonald was enthusiastic. But while Duke admired that Trump was “encapsulating the desires and the values of European Americans who have been silenced for too long,” he still insisted Trump was not doing enough to revitalize white nationalism. Duke, in a rather Trumpian manner, took credit for that himself. “I don’t know if he’s the savior of our people, and I don’t know if we can even trust him to do what he says,” Duke ruminated, before adding, “At least he’s saying it.”

In February, the hammer finally fell. On his online radio program, recorded the day of Trump’s victory in the Nevada caucuses, Duke credited Trump with energizing white nationalists, and effectively endorsed him, imploring voters in that state to turn out. “You have an absolute obligation to vote for Donald Trump, and to vote against Cruz and Rubio,” Duke said. “If you vote for Ted Cruz, you are acting in a traitorous way to our people. You are betraying our people. Period.” He cautioned that he didn’t agree with everything Trump said, but argued, “Trump is the only chance we really have right now to make a dent, plus Trump is waking up our people and energizing our people across America.”

After Duke’s endorsement, most other white nationalist leaders fell in line.

Occidental Dissent’s Wallace rang in with his endorsement on February 27, after a widely read New York Times article detailed the turmoil the candidate was causing within the Republican Party establishment. “This is a beautiful thing Donald Trump has already done for us. Who would have thought this would happen a year ago?” Wallace wrote. “We owe him our support on Super Tuesday” on March 1.

He believed Trump was trying subtly to acknowledge a conspiracy. “There are these moments with Trump where he’s half-saying something, he’s half-indicating a greater truth.”

Matthew Heimbach, the head of a small but hyperactive neo-Nazi group called the Traditionalist Youth Network, went so far as to show up at Trump rallies. Like many other white nationalists, Heimbach still wasn’t convinced that Trump was a true ally, but he recognized an opportunity when he saw it. During at least one rally, Heimbach screamed at and shoved a female African-American protestor.

Rocky Suhayda, of the American Nazi Party, one of the most extreme groups with an extensive online following, was one of a dwindling number of white nationalists who withheld his organization’s endorsement. But even Suhayda reveled in the media circus. The candidate “isn’t one of us,” he wrote in March, but “like him or not, Donald Trump sure has gotten under the systemite establishment's skin. From the controlled jews-media, to the ‘mainstream’ Republirat establishment itself, they ALL seem to HATE him with a passion!”

***

As Trump racked up primary wins and suddenly appeared unstoppable, his white nationalist support began to attract deeper scrutiny in the mainstream press. Reporters pored over his comments, his tweets and his increasingly noisy racist supporters. On February 28, in a now-infamous incident, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump to comment about Duke’s endorsement.

“I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists,” Trump said in response to persistent questioning. He insisted he couldn’t even disavow the Ku Klux Klan without doing more research.

The mainstream backlash was swift: Politifact called Trump’s claim to know nothing about Duke and the KKK “absurd” and awarded it a “pants-on-fire” rating.

Trump soon disavowed Duke. But by that point, his white nationalist supporters didn’t much care. In fact, the CNN interview put to rest virtually all meaningful objections to Trump within the white nationalist community, except for the most-hardened and extreme adherents. Some white nationalists were initially confused by Trump’s professions of ignorance about the KKK, but many more believed his refusal to disavow Duke on air was the natural culmination of what Anglin had called the “wink wink wink” strategy, or what mainstream commenters call dog-whistling.

“In my 40+ years, that was the best political thing I have seen in my life, and nothing even comes close,” wrote one Stormfront poster, in one of thousands of posts about the interview across white nationalist sites and platforms.

With a long and persistent series of racial cues, Trump had won the benefit of the doubt from the white nationalist community. In the wake of the CNN interview, a new consensus emerged in that community: Trump was secretly sympathetic to white nationalism, to a greater or lesser degree, and anything he said that contradicted the goals of the movement could be dismissed as an expediency, necessary to get elected. Many white nationalists commenting online thought he actually needed to be more careful about concealing his supposed beliefs in order to advance through the election.

“He's getting really ballsy and unapologetic about what he does,” a Stormfront user wrote. “That's exactly what we need in a leader but he has to be careful and not push it too far.”

“I adore the Donald so far but he has to be more careful because he is walking a very fine line here. He can't be so extreme... yet,” wrote another.

Duke himself articulated this idea almost immediately after the Tapper interview. “If he disavows me, fine. Let him do whatever he thinks he needs to do to become president of the United States,” Duke told The Daily Beast. “It's good for him to be judicious.”

For the rest of primary season, controversies about Trump’s race-baiting remarks didn’t stop him from rising in the polls and racking up convention delegates, and so white nationalists continued to respond at a fairly regular pace to what they agreed were dog whistles. In a now-familiar pattern, Trump’s fellow Republicans in the Republican National Committee and Congress chastised the campaign for one remark after another, but few withdrew their support.

The most prominent example was in July 2016, when Trump—now the party’s presumptive nominee—tweeted an image that accused Hillary Clinton of corruption and featured a Star of David. He quickly deleted it after an uproar on social media. But even after it was discovered that the image had originated on a racist 8chan message board, Trump defended the tweet, arguing that he shouldn’t have taken it down and claiming the graphic simply showed a “sheriff’s star.” Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan allowed that the image was anti-Semitic, but he didn’t withdraw his endorsement. RNC chairman Reince Priebus brushed it off, saying, “They figured it out, and they fixed it.”

When Trump suggested in August 2016 that Second Amendment supporters might have to redress his potential electoral loss to Clinton, Ryan said it was a “joke gone bad,” while Stormfronters cheered and mocked the “pearl-clutching media.” By the time Trump hired the executive chairman of the alt-right news site Breitbart as his campaign CEO and Donald Trump Jr. tweeted racist memes featuring Skittles and Pepe the Frog in the fall, party leaders could hardly be bothered to keep up. The steady stream of provocations kept white nationalists supportive and stimulated, even as Trump clumsily angled for votes from African-Americans and Latinos needed to be competitive in the general election.

“I'm not completely sold on him, just because of all the BS we've seen since I can remember,” a Stormfront poster wrote in late September. “[But] I'm at the point that I've seen enough. I believe this guy truly wants the best for this country. I can't believe that someone would put forth all this energy, and face all this ridicule, just to be another puppet in the machine. I'm locked into the vote.”

***

About two weeks out from the election, a few white nationalist holdouts remain. They continue to post in a thread on Stormfront titled “Why I refuse to vote for Trump,” which started in December and has generated thousands of responses. But even that bastion has largely become a repository for campaign updates, with ample posts from Trump supporters.

Some white nationalists were upset by the recent release of the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape capturing Trump bragging about sexual assault. But many attributed the leak and subsequent accusations of sexual misconduct to a Jewish conspiracy.

So they were primed when, in a speech in Florida last week, Trump blasted “those who control the levers of power in Washington, and … the global special interests.” He accused Clinton of conspiring with “international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.”

For many Americans, these references might seem merely paranoid. But the hard-won, faithful white nationalist converts to Trumpism had heard and used these terms for decades. And they had a clear idea what their candidate’s words meant.

The headline on the VNN Forum that night? “Trump Just Forced the Lying Press to Admit the Kikes Run the World.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Donald Trump's campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, as founder of Breitbart News; he is executive chairman.