The organizers of the Deutsches Haus are displeased about this whole David Duke situation, they want to be clear. Since he first showed up on the grounds of their annual Oktoberfest here in Kenner, Louisiana—"America's City," they call it, right on the Mississippi riverfront—two weeks ago, he has been a bother, threatening to pervert this gathering of people who just want to drink beer and do the hokey-pokey in their lederhosen, and tormenting the staff who cannot legally, by virtue of their status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, make him leave their public event for which he paid an eight-dollar admission fee like everyone else. It's difficult to forget what one of the board members described to me as "that 12-year stain" on German history (you know the one) when there's an honest-to-God former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan moseying around, shaking hands and passing out blue-and-white hats saying VOTE FOR DUKE AND TRUMP!

It was 6 p.m. on Friday, October 21, and Duke was late. Jan, a young, white cop with a crewcut, was standing stoically near a beer vendor when I asked if he'd seen the candidate. "Have you seen him lately?" he shot back, his eyebrows raising. He says it seems like Duke has had a lot of work done, "but it's not good work. He looks like he just got out of a coffin, he looks like a corpse, that's the nicest way I could put it."

He wasn't making fun of Duke when he said this. He wore a pained expression and a faraway gaze, as if recalling some kind of science-fiction trauma he couldn't quite make sense of. "He's a weird-looking person," he said, shaking his head. "I couldn't get past that." When Duke was here last week, Jan explained, a couple of his colleagues talked to him, but he couldn't stomach it, so he just walked away. He sighed. "I don't know how you're gonna do it."

A few stalls and many crowds of drunk people across the grounds, Theresa Crosby, Deutsches Haus' executive director, sat behind a raffle booth, wearing a dirndl and ruffled bloomers. "He has been here uninvited," she told me. "He was told that he cannot hand out anything political, and he could not ask people to wear stickers and things like that." For emphasis, she ran down the list of her rules for all political figures, but most of all for this particular 66-year-old candidate for the United States Senate: "You cannot pass out any literature, you cannot put any stickers on people, you cannot hold court, you cannot make any announcements. If you go around and people come up to you, that's fine, but you cannot go around and harass our people."

Republican candidate for state representative, David Duke, former grand wizard of Ku Klux Klan, campaigns in 1989. Debra Lex/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Crosby knew Duke when she was younger, she said, when he first started running for office, "before the whole KKK thing came out." He had tried to date her back then, but then again, he had tried to date multiple young, blonde women she knew. "I have the Anglo-Saxon look–he told me that! Blonde hair, blue eyes." His method of wooing her was to give her a signed copy of one of his books. It didn't work. "None of us here support him," she said.

A male Deutsches Haus member who asked not to be named stood to Crosby's right, selling raffle tickets for a chance to win a Saran-wrapped wheelbarrow full of alcohol. "One dollar gets you in, six dollars will get you five!" he shouted at passersby. "Your lips say no but your eyes say jawohl!"

This Duke thing "sucks," he told me. "It's a challenge to bat away crazies." The Nazis and skinheads show up to local events on occasion, sure, but at least they're usually not famous. Hosting Duke at your celebration of German heritage is like inviting O.J. Simpson to your bachelorette party, a horrifying distraction made worse by the fact that he actually has some fans here. "There's an older crew we're trying to disabuse ourselves of," the member said, adding that they are thankfully "dying out."

"There's so much good about the German culture, and then you have David Duke walk in and—" he threw himself onto the raffle booth in a fit of theatrical despair.

"You know the word schadenfreude?" he asked.

And then, in the distance, there he was: the lopsided face of evil–a tall scarecrow of a man with cornflake-colored hair and suspiciously taut skin around his eyes. He wore a navy suit and tie with a camel-colored fleece beneath his jacket, the lapel of which was decorated by a small pin of two intertwined flags: American and Confederate.

He walked through the crowd and smiled. "I feel like I'm back in Munich!"

Hey, how y'all doing? David Duke." Duke said, extending his hand to greet an overweight man in a baseball cap. His strategy for meeting potential voters is to walk slowly with his face jutted out until someone gives him a look of recognition, at which point, assuming that look of recognition doesn't also look like they've just seen a ghost, he makes his move, his weak, nasal voice struggling to break through the polka music and the drunken chatter to deliver his pitch. "I think I'm the only one the media hates more than Donald Trump!" he said, laughing. "But you know, I think that's a good thing." The man nodded. "It could be," he said.

He walked a few feet more through the crowd, cheating on his Paleo diet with a beer and telling me about his pet Maltese, Torri, and his tormented long-distance relationship with a woman named Mia, whom he says is a lawyer who lives in Austria. "I saw her in Argentina a year ago," he said, "we had a very close relationship for a long time but it just, things happen."

He stopped in front of a small group to make his case again. "You've probably heard about me once or twice," he said. "In fact, I'm the only person the media hates more than Donald Trump, and I don't know if that's such a bad thing, because the media is, like–I don't think the media's on our side."

Hosting Duke at your celebration of German heritage is like inviting O.J. Simpson to your bachelorette party.

And then again. "Hello, how ya doing? David Duke, running for Senate. I need your vote. It's amazing where the country's going, and if Hillary gets in, God help us," he said. "All you've gotta remember is Trump and Duke!"

Duke, like Trump, claims to hate the very media that made him a known entity in the first place. It took weeks of phone calls to get him to agree to speak with me. In one of those conversations, he asked if my last name was Italian. "Good," he replied when I said it was. Whether it was my ethnicity or something else that sealed the deal, he told me to meet him at Oktoberfest at 6 p.m. When he arrived just after 8, he explained that he was late because he spent the day with an ABC News camera crew. He thought he'd won them over.

A member of the Deutsches Haus staff spotted him, and, after gaining her composure, marched up to him. "Nice to see you again," she said through her teeth. "Don't pass out any material, please." Duke smiled, "I understand. Got it."

He turned to his three male volunteers: a youthful teacher from Tennessee, a middle-aged law-enforcement official from Washington state, and an older Austrian lawyer, all of whom are living with him in his house in Mandeville and none of whom wanted to tell me their full names. "Where's your hats?" Duke asked them. "You need to put your hats on." Obediently, they did, their foreheads compelling all to vote for him and for the Republican presidential nominee.

The Trump campaign didn't know about the hats. When I told him, campaign spokesman Jason Miller said, "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."

Duke isn't bothered much by the rejection. "I don't care," he told me. "They don't care about hats, they don't care about any of that. It's not an issue. That's just hats that we wear around Louisiana." He understands, he said, that the campaign may be caught up in "politics," and he's politically astute enough to know that, as a general election strategy, accepting the cool embrace of a former Klansman who now calls himself a "human rights activist" but still argues the very racist idea that people are better off keeping to their own "heritage" isn't really feasible.

In New Orleans last month, Duke disrupts a protest organized by Take Em Down NOLA, who wants statues of Confederate figures to be taken down. Gerald Herbert

Still, his reputation frustrates him. "What have we come to in America where an individual can't say who we should support and vote for?" he asked. "The idea the media would condemn a candidate because of who's gonna vote for them is ridiculous." When I told him Ann Coulter had recently said, on Real Time with Bill Maher, that she didn't even think he existed, that he was just a bogeyman the left invented to harm the right, he said, "Ann Coulter is so savaged by the media, I guess she's gotta feel like, 'Well, at least I'm not David Duke!' But if you really look at what she says, if you read her books, it's very close to what I've been saying.

"If you look at what they say about me, it's a caricature," he continued. "It's 'KKK,' it's like three scarlet letters in front of my name, every time they mention my name; it's like part of my birth certificate."

The rise of the other white man with funny hair has done more to help Duke and his cause than perhaps any other event in modern American history. It's why he waited barely 24 hours after Trump accepted the Republican Party's presidential nomination to announce his own candidacy, for the Senate seat vacated by the retirement of David Vitter, the Republican best known for appearing on the D.C. Madam's call list and getting off scot-free. Louisiana's crowded "jungle primary," in which 23 candidates of all party affiliations will appear on the same ballot, means that a small percentage of the vote will get a candidate to the runoff election, and with Trump polling around 14 percent—as high a margin as he enjoys in almost any other Southern state—it was clear to Duke that there is room in the Republican Party and the mainstream political discourse for a version of his thinking. The Louisiana GOP moved quickly to denounce him, calling him a "hate-filled fraud," but Duke charged on. The time had come for what he described to me as "my controversialness."

To Duke, the language of the Trump campaign that so shocked the political and media establishments–that Mexico was sending drugs, criminals, and "rapists" over the border intentionally–sounded pleasantly familiar. "I thought great–very powerful, very good," he told me. "I do believe that absolutely most Americans agree with what he says and what I've been saying for years and years. We've had a controlled media that has basically not let the message get through properly, and his celebrity status and position in the base help that message get through, and that's a great thing."

In 1977, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan dispatched several hundred members to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border in Southern California, Texas, and New Mexico. Duke was there, pictured in Dulzura, California riding shotgun in a car labeled KLAN BORDER WATCH, a walkie-talkie the size of a loaf of bread in his hand. The Klan, Duke told the press then, "has the support of the American people." He blamed undocumented immigrants for taking jobs away from hard-working citizens. "We will be here," he said, "as long as it takes to meet the response."

Today, Duke believes "there's a war on white men in this country," and his ideas are the only thing that can win it. "Duke is in this race because of Trump," Heidi Beirich, a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. "Duke is more blatantly racist and anti-Semitic than Trump, but Trump has played so much footsie with these people that how could Duke not like him?"

"If you look at what they say about me, it's a caricature."

Duke is not the only Louisiana Senate candidates attempting to ride on Trump's gilded coattails. Donald "Crawdaddy" Crawford, a man with a colorful name but the charisma of a starfish, is running to convince Louisiana to "vote for Donald twice!" He's put out an 11-point fact sheet highlighting all the ways he and Trump are alike, from their outsider status to their desire to "put Louisiana and America first." But, concerned by my questions about Duke and Trump's less savory attributes, he told me his similarities to both men end at their platform positions, and that he's not like them personally at all. "I don't have anything against any race of people," he said.

Trump has appeared conflicted about how to handle Duke and his followers supporting his campaign. On one hand, they're a nuisance, unfairly shading his core supporters with their bigotry. On the other, they're helpful, fighting on his behalf with an unrelenting fervor he appreciates. In February, when Trump was asked to disavow Duke on CNN, he waffled. "I don't know anything about David Duke," he said. A few days and hundreds of requests for clarification later, he blamed the episode on a problem with his earpiece and said in no uncertain terms, "David Duke is a bad person who I disavowed on numerous occasions." Yet online, he continued his flirtation with white nationalists and the so-called alt-right, tweeting out images–like a Star of David illustration–that originated on Nazi forums and reaping the rewards of being their "daddy."

Duke refers to the alt-right as "some young people" and the racist and anti-Semitic images they produce as "satire" meant to rebel against their mistreatment in the media and popular culture. It only makes sense, he said, since he often turns on the TV only to hear white people being mocked and called "inbreds" or "rednecks" on The Daily Show or other liberal programs. "Jamie Foxx was in Django," he told me, referring to the movie Django Unchained, "and he says, 'kill white people and get paid for it, what's not to like?' He's the hero of the movie." I noted that the movie was a work of fiction, but Duke said it didn't matter. "If there was a white hero of a movie who was presented as a great guy and who, say his family was attacked by blacks—and by the way, there's been a lot more white families, every year, there's tens of thousands of white families, women, children, adults, who are attacked by blacks physically, all right?" he said. "I'm not saying this to condemn them."

As leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke patrols the California-Mexico border looking for illegal immigrants. Bettmann/Getty Images

Duke was radicalized as a teenager, after growing up with a frequently absent, authoritarian dad and an alcoholic, pill-addicted mother with whom he was left alone after his sister, Dottie, fled home at 12. He had few friends and bided the time by swimming and tending to his pet rats. "There was no one there to teach him to be a balanced human being," Dottie said, according to the 1995 biography The Rise of David Duke, "no one there to slow him down and channel his energy into something positive."

He became infatuated with the Citizens' Council, a white supremacist network that worked to oppose racial integration, devouring their literature and visiting their New Orleans office, where he was kicked out for praising Adolf Hitler, according to the biography. By his sophomore year at Louisiana State University, where he was nicknamed "The Nazi of LSU," he'd founded the National Socialist Liberation Front, later renamed the White Student Alliance, a student chapter of the American Nazi Party. And by 1973, he was openly pledging allegiance to the KKK, which gave him the title of Grand Dragon and ultimately Grand Wizard, even amid accusations of grifting from his fellow Klansmen. "I didn't really wear the hoods much, but we did ceremonies. I know some people think it's a silly-looking thing, but the Catholic church might have silly-looking garments, too," he told me. "You know what we swore in our oath? We swore allegiance to the Constitution of the United States." He added, "I don't know any white supremacists that believe whites should be ruling over blacks, hurting blacks, oppressing blacks. There is a major supremacist state in the planet today, and it's called Israel."

Duke ran unsuccessfully for a series of state legislature positions in the 1970s and for president, first as a Democrat and then as the Populist Party nominee, in 1988, before ultimately becoming a Republican and winning a seat in the Louisiana legislature in 1989 in a special election. He embarked on a seemingly endless stream of campaigns after that, for the U.S. Senate in 1990 and for governor the following year (memorably inspiring supporters of his opponent, the gloriously corrupt Edwin Edwards, to use the slogan "Vote for the crook, it's important"), and then again for president and for seats in both chambers of Congress.

"He's a very intelligent fellow, if a person with his philosophy can be intelligent," Edwards told me over coffee in his home office in Gonzales. Edwards is 89 now and five years out of prison, with a 38-year-old wife, Trina, who he met while behind bars (she wrote him letters), a 3-year-old son, Eli, conceived using his frozen sperm, and two donkey-sized collies, Brooke and Belle. "We didn't have a very acrimonious election," he told me. When he was asked at the time if he and Duke had anything in common, Edwards famously replied, "We both have been wizards beneath the sheets."

"When he ran against me and whenever he was running, he always capitalized not just on people who didn't like the race problem, but people who didn't like government, as Trump is doing," Edwards told me. "He has captured, in my opinion, the attitude of many people in America who just are fed up with the government."

In the ensuing decades, Duke faded into the far-right margins, serving time in prison for filing false tax returns, hosting a radio program, earning a doctorate at an anti-Semitic university in Ukraine, and hawking his books while our country elected its first African-American president. But then something incredible happened: the campaign to Make America Great Again!

"I think he listens to my radio program sometimes, but I don't know, I can't prove that," Duke said of Trump. "He's not, look, he's not a, uh, intellect, really, he's not an academic. But he's genuine, I really think he's genuine."

"In some ways he's empowered by his celebrity status and the goodwill he built up from his television, and he's got a lot of money," he said, "and I think if I were to have his money, or if I were to just have been in a situation where I was popular, and then I started talking, I think there'd be no question I'd be president this time."

Duke in 1991, during his gubernatorial campaign against Edwin Edwards.

I knew I would see your racist motherfucking ass again!" a young man shouted at Oktoberfest, his concerned mother standing next to him in solidarity. "Go get your fucking robe!" Duke smiled uncomfortably. "Aren't you a nice guy," he replied. "Go get your fucking robe!" the man shouted again. "How about your son that disowned you–" His mom cut in to correct him: "His godson," she said, referring to Derek Black, the son of Duke's ex-wife, Chloe, and Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, who recently left the movement, "his godson."

The man told me his name was Ryan Harbison and he was a 25-year-old fan of Bernie Sanders, whose pin he'd fastened on his hat. "I hate him," he told me of Duke. "Hate is a strong word, but he uses hate against other people, so I guess, in a way, I hate his hate. Two weeks ago, he was here, and I thought that was very inappropriate of him to do it at a German festival, because it makes it seem like we're all, you know, racists, and we're not. I hate what he stands for, I don't want what he wants to have happen."

"If I were to have his money, or I was popular ... I think there'd be no question I'd be president this time."

Harbison was far from the only one shooting sickened looks in Duke's direction at the festival. When he tried to shake the hand of Catherine Farnsworth Gensler, a 53-year-old teacher from Duke's hometown, she glared up at him like he was some combination of an ISIS fighter and a Maroon 5 band member. She refused to extend hers, but he grabbed it anyway. "I don't support him," she told me, and then she turned to him. "I don't support you, I'm sorry." Duke seemed startled. "What?" he asked. "I don't support you," she said. "That's fine, that's all right," he told her. "But I'm gonna get a lot of votes. I think I'm gonna win this time."

Duke polls between 3 and 5 percent, enough to qualify him for the November 2 debate, which will be held at the historically black Dillard University. But he believes, much as Trump does, that the polls don't adequately represent his support, since people may be reluctant to tell a pollster they plan to vote for him. "I'm polling about 20, maybe 25 percent," he told me, despite a complete lack of evidence to support this claim. "Trump's basically the same thing. That's why I think Trump's gonna win big."

"That's really not true," said Rick Shaftan, a conservative pollster and media consultant who in August polled 400 people in rural Louisiana. "People think he's a joke. It's pretty much, he's just a Klansman and a kook. These are the same people who will trash Black Lives Matter and say they're a bunch of racists, but then they just think David Duke's a racist."

Duke's been trying for decades now to shake the kook thing, but he's never managed to do it. He blames the media, who he talks about as some kind of monolithic entity out to punish him for his history. "Nelson Mandela was part of the Communist central committee," he told me, complaining that headlines about the deceased South African president didn't call him a "former Communist." But he also can't help himself, referring to his status as a "leading white spokesman" and diverting conversations about immigration to pseudo-intellectual riffs on "species" and the fact that Europeans have a "very straight nose."

Duke at a fundraiser during his 1991 run for governor. Mark Peterson/Corbis/Getty Images

"I guess they always say beauty's in the eye of the beholder," he told me. "There are different standards, and I think everything is subjective in that way. Let's put it this way: I love my particular culture, my heritage. That's what I want my children to enjoy."

I asked him about his particular culture. "I listen to a lot of acoustics," he said. "I like ballad-type music. I like the classics, of course, as well. I like a lot of uh, kind of rock that's kind of uh, upbeat rock. I used to be friends with the Lynyrd Skynyrd band years ago. He was actually going to meet me in Louisiana when his plane crashed." His favorite singer today, he said, is Malukah, a Mexican composer who achieved fame on YouTube.

"I'm looking forward to watching Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge, I think it looks like a great movie," he went on. "I really have a lot of respect for Mel Gibson. He got in a lot of trouble a few years ago, but thank God he quit drinking." He doesn't watch much TV these days. "I watched a few of the Game of Thrones," he said. "Because I don't watch many of them, I'm not really immune to seeing all this crap, and so when I watch it, I'm really shocked, you know? The torture's in there, cutting off penises, it's unbelievable. This is popular culture now."

He laughed.

"It's always like the bad guys win."