Do you remember … ?
Do you remember that Donald Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed and lied (or conveniently forgot) about which book it was and the origins of the man who gave it to him? That (in the same article) his cousin, John Walter, says “Heil, Hitler” when he visits Trump in his office? That for decades he helped his father obscure the origins of the Trumps, claiming they were Swedish instead of German so it would be easier to sell housing to Jews? That he retweeted a Benito Mussolini quote and really didn’t care that it was Mussolini’s? That, all along, with his numerous retweets and disingenuous remarks about David Duke and the KKK, he’s been courting the white supremacist and neo-Nazi vote while claiming total innocence of what he’s doing?
Wonder about his innocence no more. Footage from an hour-long French-produced documentary, Donald Trump: The Apprentice President?, contains disturbing evidence that, well before the primaries, Trump knowingly had direct ties to at least one ultra-right European party and quite possibly more, including France’s infamous neo-fascist National Front.
Guido Lombardi, the Lega Nord, Marine Le Pen, and the National Front
The clip from the film that you should watch starts at 26:59 and goes for another nine minutes and 45 seconds. In it, close Trump friend and "shadow adviser" Guido “George” Lombardi, a longtime representative of the extreme right-wing Italian party Lega Nord1 (Northern League), takes the French team to Trump's campaign HQ. Up to that time, they were the only cameras that had ever entered. To my knowledge, no one else has made it that far again.
Lombardi and the documentary team go into his own ties to the National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, and his attempt to set up a Le Pen-Trump meeting. According to Lombardi, the only thing that kept Trump from meeting with Le Pen was her inability to get him any votes. Trump seems perfectly aware of who Le Pen is and what she stands for, but Lombardi doesn’t report any other negative reaction on Trump’s part. It seems clear, though, that Trump understood why Lombardi and Le Pen are close.
Lega Nord (Italy), the National Front (France), and the Party for Freedom (Holland)
Lega Nord and the National Front are also closely allied with the Dutch ultra-right Party for Freedom (PVV) and its leader, Geert Wilders, who spoke at a small event for Trump’s gay supporters at the Republican National Convention (RNC). Wilders is now being prosecuted in the Netherlands for inciting racial hatred. Interesting, in the context of Rosine Ghawji (see below), is the fact that Wilders was invited to the RNC by a Tennessee state senator.
It’s already been reported that Marine Le Pen is a great admirer of Trump and wants to meet him, but, contrary to some reports, the film shows that she wanted to do it before, not after he were to win the election.
The Lombardi-Trump relationship
Lombardi and Trump have been friends for years (see the bottom story about Ronald Kessler’s book release party). He also lives in Trump Tower just a few floors away (though apparently not just as a “Trump supporter” and a Lega Nord “sympathizer”).
Lombardi has two websites, guidolombardi.wordpress.com and guidolombardi.org. I wanted to access the older one (guidolombardi.org) because it seems to be much more open about his politics, but each time I try to access it, I get security warnings that I hesitate to disregard.
However, Lombardi’s only book published in English, The Value Matrix (2003; 2nd ed., 2011), has a few blurbs about it or on the cover. One is by Donald Trump. The Amazon page for the second edition says it “describes a revolutionary new approach to our perception of what and who should be considered valuable” (italics mine). I have to wonder what “and who” means. Considering Lega Nord has been anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist even against other Italians, I’m worried. But I haven’t been able to read the book yet.
Also, Lombardi published a book on Trump in September specifically for the French market—because of the National Front?—that seems to be a partial adaptation of The Value Matrix. www.amazon.com/…
Rosine Ghawji, the Tennessee Trump campaign, and the National Front
Rosine Ghawji is also in the clip. She’s a French-American fan of the National Front and, at least at the time of filming, Trump’s campaign coordinator for Tennessee. She got the film team access to Lombardi, with whom she seems close.
What’s most interesting about her may be her thoughts on Trump and Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, Marine’s father, and a brazen Holocaust denier. The father is still alive, and his continuing unreconstructed neo-Nazism, which occasionally becomes public, has caused his daughter to make him more of a pariah, since he spoils her attempts to bring the National Front more into the mainstream. Ghawji is quite happy that somehow Trump not only gets away with saying what Jean-Marie Le Pen said in the way he said it, but becomes more popular the more he does. In Le Pen’s case, she says, the media were able to crush him; in Trump’s case, they are ineffectual.
Her openness with a French documentary team about her admiration for Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front suggests Ghawji3 would have shared those same opinions with Trump.
The fundraiser and film screening, brought to you by Christian Action Network
After their visit to Trump's pathetic campaign HQ,2 Lombardi and Ghawji go to a fundraiser where Lombardi has set up a screening of the notorious anti-Muslim film Europe’s Last Stand: America’s Final Warning. One of its most infamous, and widely debunked, assertions is that there are “no-go zones” in Britain and France where fundamentalist Muslims and sharia law reign supreme.
The film is presented by the organization that made it, the Christian Action Network (CAN), which the filmmakers say promotes “white Christian” values. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has designated CAN a hate group, not only for its anti-Muslim political activity but also for its rabidly anti-LGBT stance.
From “One More Enemy” by Robert Steinback, SPLC Intelligence Report, 2011 Fall Issue, August 24, 2011:
The Christian Action Network (CAN) is a group also focused on bashing gay men and lesbians. In 2005, for example, after actress Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on her popular sitcom, CAN President Martin Mawyer warned, “If we allow the tidal wave of gay and lesbian smut to continue to pour into our homes, it will utterly consume us in no time at all!”
By 2009, however, CAN was showing interest in the issue of radical Islam, producing a “documentary” called “Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S.” that claimed there were three dozen such camps on American soil. And that interest has only expanded as Americans grew more receptive. CAN recently announced a “Counter-Jihad Summit” for this August, saying, “Our public schools are sneaking into their curricula pro-Islamic teachings that actually promote Sharia law. An entire generation of our children is being brainwashed!” (The similarity between this claim and anti-gay groups’ claims about gays is hard to miss.)
I think it's a reasonable assumption that Trump knew at that time about the Christian Action Network and its representative at the screening, Martin Mawyer. After all, this was a Guido Lombardi-sponsored fundraiser not far from Trump Tower. Still, the exact nature of the relationship needs further exploration, particularly since this was very early on in Trump’s campaign.4
So … is he or isn’t he?
This film clip, combined with what we’ve learned about Trump’s past and what we’ve seen of him and his European admirers on the campaign trail, point to much, much cozier relationships with Europe’s far-right and even neo-fascist political parties than anyone had previously thought. They really do allow this question to be begged at its loudest yet: Is Donald Trump knowingly a neo-fascist?
More than I ever thought before, I now think the answer is yes. And the European parties who are presumably his allies all have very explicit anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim programs that will almost certainly find a concrete place in Trump’s political landscape, whether he lands in the White House or elsewhere, eventually.
We and our news organizations5 need to be asking more about the relationships---NOW.
1My apologies for using this article, which is written in English by a native Italian speaker. However, it is the best, most succinct, most straightforward article I was able to find on Lega Nord in limited time.
2Note that, although the HQ seems “pathetic” on its face due to lack of materials and staff, Trump has made more than $1 million by renting the space to his campaign.
3Ghawji’s story is fascinating. She was previously married to a Muslim man. She claims his brother-in-law knew about radical Islamist terror attacks. She’s given speeches against Muslims and “Barack HUSSEIN Obama” since at least 2010. This barely scratches the surface.
4Besides Martin Mawyer, another person at the screening features prominently. At this point, this is probably all you need to know about Frank Mitchell: ashiningcityonahill.org I haven’t found any evidence yet to suggest Trump and Mitchell had a close relationship at that time or since.
5I sent most of these findings to ten (?) of the most prominent and prestigious English-language news organizations and journalists on Friday and Saturday. I’m just one person, and I’d hoped they could bring their resources to bear on the whole stew. I thought someone would recognize that, although some of this information had come out before, the dots hadn’t been connected, particularly because no one in the English-language world seems to have noticed the French-produced documentary, which wasn’t even available for free on YouTube until yesterday. But no one has uttered a word to me or the world. Even though it is very, very late in this long, hard game, I thought I should still say something.