A protester faces white nationalists including Matthew Heimbach, the founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, who holds a sign while standing behind a police officer. PHOTOGRAPH BY JEREMY HOGAN / ALAMY

On Sunday, while video of a few dozen skinheads and white nationalists brawling with “anti-Fascist” protesters in Sacramento was cycling on CNN, Matthew Heimbach was watching his comrades online from his home, in Indiana. The white nationalists represented a California chapter of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a small, extreme right-wing group that Heimbach founded last year. At twenty-five, he is an entrepreneurial zealot who has tried to bring skinheads and racial theorists together in a spirit that he calls “boots and suits.” The Southern Poverty Law Center calls him “this generation’s David Duke.” In the California melee, at least seven people were stabbed; nine were hospitalized. Afterward, Heimbach told me his members were defending themselves against opponents. “More of them ended up going to the hospital than us,” he said, adding, “but it really is tragic that that had to happen in the first place.”

A few years ago, Heimbach was a student at Towson University, in Maryland, a campus gadfly who attracted attention by advocating for a “White Student Union.” These days, Heimbach is pursuing larger provocations—the California rally, a recently established newspaper, an album of white-nationalist music. He credits the expansion in part to Donald Trump’s candidacy. “Donald Trump is not one of us, which is why we're not officially endorsing him, but he's introducing these ideas to the public sphere,” Heimbach said. “Donald Trump shows the Republican cowardice against their own base, but also the fact that reform is impossible within the system.”

Last summer, when Trump’s denunciation of immigrants was beginning to excite neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and others on the far right, I visited Heimbach and watched the first Republican debate at his house. At the time, when Trump’s candidacy was still regarded as a farce and the prospect of Great Britain voting to exit the European Union was unimaginable, Heimbach framed his indictment of “rampant multiculturalism” in economic terms. “Even if you play the game, even if you do everything right, then the future, when it comes to your income, when it comes to benefits, when it comes to everything, we are going to be the first generation in American history to be living worse than our parents,” he said. “My own parents tell me, ‘Well, you should just shut up, you should go get a normal job, and get a two-car garage, and then you’ll be happy.’ ” (That article included mention that Matthew Parrott, a housemate and fellow white nationalist, was drinking from a swastika coffee cup. After Parrott was mocked online, he replied, in an anti-Semitic post, “I grabbed the only clean cup from the cabinet without giving it a second thought.”) In March, as Trump was closing in on the Republican nomination, Heimbach was recorded pushing and shouting at an African-American woman at a Trump rally.

Heimbach is aware of the political dynamic of which he is a part: by announcing the Sacramento protest far in advance, his group could virtually guarantee that it would attract opponents, and, indeed, it did. The California state police say that the melee was probably started by counterprotesters, which the far right embraced as new evidence of its victimhood. In an editorial after the violence, the Los Angeles Times editorial board called the originally scheduled protest “The Neo-Nazi’s Guide to Getting Attention”: “We agree with Antifa Sacramento, the group that organized the counter-protest, that there’s no place in America for the racism at the core of the white nationalist agenda. What we disagree with is the idea that skinheads and neo-Nazis, or anyone else with a wrongheaded view, shouldn't have a 1st Amendment right to free speech.” In Britain, where white nationalists have been rallying in celebration of the Brexit vote, some opponents, trying to avoid physical confrontation, have adopted taunts: “Super race? You’re having a laugh! Super race? You’re having a laugh!”

Before the event in Sacramento, Heimbach was relishing the result of Britain’s vote to leave the E.U., following a campaign that raged against immigrants and economic inequity—a message that the American far right has been trying to promote in the United States. He is encouraged that polls underestimated British support for leaving the E.U. “We're part of a global movement that's on the rise,” he said. In preparation for the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, Heimbach’s group has applied for a permit to protest, but the permit has not been granted, so he plans to get as close as he can to the Quicken Loans Arena for “literature distribution,” he said. “We’re definitely going to be having a presence.”

With Trump’s poll numbers dropping, I asked Heimbach what will happen to far-right activists like him if Trump’s candidacy ends in failure. “Donald Trump was never going to be the solution, and if he loses it's going to be because the Republican establishment betrayed him, which he's already saying they're doing,” he said. In any event, he expects his own moment to continue. “When you put everything together, I think it's pretty clear that my form of nationalism is on the rise in Europe. It's on the rise with the rest of the world, and I think it's going to be the natural, logical next step,” he added. Others on the far right encouraged their followers to prepare for more violence. In a post about Sacramento, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site, declared, “Go to the gym, train in martial arts, train to use weapons. The future depends on each one of you being prepared for what’s coming. We are in a race war.”

It is a strange fact of 2016 that writing about Presidential politics requires understanding corners of the Internet that did not, a year ago, have any connection to the main stage. Ignoring the far right is not an option. Ryan Lenz, a senior editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who monitors hate speech and extremist groups, told me, “What happens when the great hope of Donald Trump fails for the white nationalist movement? That’s the scenario.”

Lenz said his organization has confirmed that Heimbach’s groups, including the political party, have fourteen chapters, though it’s not clear that any contain more than a few scattered sympathizers. Most are in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. For that reason, the Sacramento incident served an additional purpose, a suggestion of new reach, which Heimbach is eager to confirm: “This is totally organized by our chapter on the West Coast,” he said. “We're active everywhere.”