His rhetoric is what 'I would have done, things I would have said,' says a former white supremacist
In the early morning hours of July 14, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to lash out at four progressive congresswomen of color known as “The Squad,” telling them to “go back” to their “crime infested” countries.
Trump denied that his tweets about the congresswomen, all U.S. citizens, were racist, but people familiar with white nationalism, including former leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, say the president’s language echoes that of white supremacists.
“This is the same type of rhetoric I see frequently when I’m monitoring white supremacist groups,” said Keegan Hankes, interim research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, “this kind of idea that individuals who are from a different ethnic background or from a different country are somehow not American or less American or are not a part of … quote-unquote Western civilization.”
Hankes said he wasn’t sure if Trump was trying to appeal to white supremacists, but he said his language was emboldening them.
“This is rhetoric that they are very familiar with and they use themselves on a lot of occasions, so I’m sure that he found common cause with many of them,” Hankes said.
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Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer, wrote on his website: “This is the kind of WHITE NATIONALISM we elected him for. And we’re obviously seeing it only because there’s another election coming up. But I’ll tell you, even knowing that, it still feels so good.”
He was also particularly honest about how he interpreted Trump’s tweets.
“So this is not some half-assed anti-immigrant white nationalism,” Anglin said. “Trump is literally telling American blacks to go back to Africa.”
Since Trump was elected, Hankes said, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented a rise in the number of hate groups across the country. Last year, the organization recorded 1,020, the largest number in its history.
“And in that increase,” he said, “we saw a 50% rise in the number of white nationalist groups, and that is staggering.”
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Scott Shepherd, a former grand dragon for the KKK and organizer for David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, said the language Trump is using is attractive to white nationalists. When he was in the Klan, he said, he dreamed the country would elect a president like Trump.
“Back when I was in the movement, I was hoping there would be (a white supremacist president), and I was preaching that there would be someday,” Shepherd said. “But now that I’m out, yeah I’m surprised that Trump was elected like he was.”
White supremacists are particularly dangerous today, Shepherd said, because they aren’t wearing robes and hoods like they did when he was in the Klan. He said he was particularly blown away by the number of torch-wielding white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
“You take five Klansmen in robes and hoods and line them against a wall, and you know what they stand for,” Shepherd said. “You take five of those people from Charlottesville (and) you put them up against a wall; you don’t know because they’re wearing plain clothes.”
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TM Garret, a former neo-Nazi and Klan leader from Germany, said he hears echoes of his former self in Trump’s rhetoric. Garret is now an anti-racism activist living in Mississippi, where he helps white supremacists escape hate groups.
“It’s things I would have done, things I would have said,” Garret said. “Twenty years ago, (he’s) the president I would have wanted.”
He stressed that he wasn’t calling Trump a racist, but he acknowledged that white supremacists welcomed his tweets.
“That’s their rhetoric,” Garret said.
He said it doesn’t matter to white supremacists that Trump later tried to downplay his tweets.
“The problem is here nobody often cares if Trump says later, ‘Um, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant they can leave.’ Nobody’s hearing that message anymore. They all hear only the hardcore message, and that’s what they stick with because that’s what extremists do,” Garret said. “They pick and choose what they want to hear.”
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Daryl Davis is a black musician, racial activist and author has been befriending members of the KKK to disrupt their ideology. He notes Trump’s history of racist rhetoric began long before he ran for president. In 1991 Trump said he didn’t want a black man counting money at his casinos, Davis noted, and in 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the death penalty for the five black young men who were wrongfully accused of raping a white woman in Central Park.
And since taking office, Davis said, Trump has referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”
“To me, that was probably one of the most racist things he’s said,” Davis said.
Besides adopting racist rhetoric, Davis said, Trump has also brought racism in America to the surface.
“Donald Trump essentially, again through no intelligent design of his own, he has handed us a gift,” Davis said. “He has brought this to the surface, (and) he has unveiled it, so now it’s up to us to address it and get it straight.”
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