Allegra Kirkland has a good piece on the white nationalist devotion to Donald Trump, as evidenced in this year's annual gathering of 300 or so of the nation's most dedicated, racist, scabby creeps 'n losers.
"I've never felt this sense of energy in our movement," the conference host, Jared Taylor, said in his opening remarks. "I've never been more optimistic." [...]
A gangly oil-and-gas industry employee from Houston, who gave his name as Karl North, praised Trump for saying "the things that other people aren’t willing to say that are just true."
As per usual, the general premise of Trump supporters remains the same. Even the lovely white supremacists don't know if Donald Trump would really follow through on his proposals to ban Muslims and build a border wall better than any other Republican-proposed border wall—they're just happy someone is finally saying all the insane things that need to be insanely said. The rest is just detail to be worked out later, after he is ensconced in office.
It's perhaps especially notable that Trump seems to be bringing in a new crop of fresh-faced young fascists into the party, people who were just too disillusioned with the not-white-enough, not immigrant-hating-enough GOP and had given up hope, until the (supposedly) fabulously wealthy New York real estate developer finally touched all the nerves that needed touching. And Donald Trump seems to have the nearly universal support of people who 1) consider the media to be conspiring against them and 2) have warped fantasies of doing something about it.
After Ramsey's speech, a young blonde man walked up to Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray and issued a warning that sounded equally ominous and troll-y.
“There’s more of us than you think,” he said to her. “We’re crashing the plane. No survivors.” [Ed. note: TPM later learned that this was an adaptation of a line Batman villain Bane says in “The Dark Knight Rises”]
Mind you, quoting a Batman movie villain is not as threatening as the quoter likely imagines it to be in his own head, but it does nicely encapsulate the general intellectual bent of people who would shell out actual money to attend a conference of fellow white nationalists.
Trump himself has been conspicuously unwilling to decry violence done in his name, merely noting that it shows how "passionate" his followers are. Yup,they sure are “passionate.”
It’s an interesting dynamic. Trump's Republican supporters—and even his own campaign staff—has been hard at work spreading the message that you should probably just ignore the details of what Donald Trump has been proposing. What’s important, they argue, is that his rhetoric shows he is "passionate" about issues like what to do about immigrants and Muslims, which means that once in office he'd probably do, well, something. At the same time, Trump himself dismisses thuggishness from his base supporters, the occasional violence at his rallies, and his uncanny popularity with the white supremacist movement all as unimportant details—what really matters is that it shows the people are "passionate" in their support of him.
So from Trump on down, nobody involved here knows what the hell they're doing or talking about and he is quite possibly doing or proposing grossly illegal things—but everyone's agreed that so long as everyone is "passionate" it’s all good and will work out fine. What a cheery, not-at-all chilling thought.
[California Trump delegate due-to-database-error William Johnson] believes Trump should simply override the judicial and legislative branches to make whatever immigration reforms he chooses.
“You could have a Trump do what Andrew Jackson did when he defied the U.S. Supreme Court and had the Trail of Tears,” Johnson said, pointing out that the president “controls the armies.”
Of course. Trump himself is under the impression he can unilaterally impose tariffs, punish corporations for insufficient American-ness, bar certain Americans from re-entering the country for a while, and a dozen other things, because he does not understand how laws work or what a president is or is not able to unilaterally do. This is good, say a large number of Donald Trump supporters—even ones who are not attending white nationalist conferences. You pair that no-nonsense approach with an army and at long last the "movement" will be able to get things done.
This hasn't been mentioned for a while, so it's worth repeating: No, the media is not covering Donald Trump's rise in the Republican Party "too much." They are covering it badly, to be sure, but they are not covering it "too much." The dismantling of one of the two dominant American political parties into something that is openly disdainful of not just the current nation’s government, but even the federal rule of law itself is a rather fucking big deal. And note that at no point did Trump "take over" the party or somehow cheat his way in: He stated his beliefs and his policy positions openly, and the party base rushed in to support him because they believe he represents the Republican "party ideals" better than any of the other candidates did.
At the same time, America’s always-simmering white nationalist movement listened as well, and have declared that they too have finally found a candidate that they can feel passionate about.
These are not two separate events. They are connected.