If you knew nothing else of last week's news, you could infer how bad it was for Donald J. Trump from the violence he did to his own Twitter feed over the weekend. It began with the usual frothing about the urgent need for his "wall," and his unbridled outrage toward the press, the FBI, James Comey, Bob Mueller, and so forth; by Sunday evening he had descended into one of his nastiest open expressions of racism yet. He followed it up with an extended quote from ... Pat Buchanan?
Now that's an interesting little tweet. In that and the tweet that preceded it, Trump is extensively quoting from a Pat Buchanan scribble that appeared Jan.10 on white nationalist and white supremacist site VDARE (no link will be given). The same column was reprinted on Buchanan's own ramshackle website, so we cannot say for certain that the sitting president was referencing the writings at one of the nation's most infamous anti-Semitic and white supremacist sites directly, but it's perhaps even less likely that Donald Trump just happened to have stumbled upon the personal website of a disgraced white nationalist and current nobody. Somebody in the White House was web surfing.
But Trump's lavish quoting of Pat Buchanan's white nationalist twitching is interesting for another reason: When Trump and Buchanan were jockeying for the Reform Party nomination in 2000, as Trump sought an entry into politics, Trump was more than willing to blast Buchanan for his history of racist and anti-Semitic statements.
“He’s a Hitler lover. I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the blacks, he doesn’t like the gays.”
“It’s just incredible,” Trump said, “that anybody could embrace this guy.”
That was then. Now Trump is eager to quote that same anti-Semite and his ravings for a white supremacy-promoting website in order to boost himself in the day’s news cycle. One wonders what White House advisers Jared and Ivanka think about that.