Donald Trump danced his now-familiar tango with the radical right this week—the one where he pulls them close in an embrace, spins away while staying connected, and then pulls them back to close quarters. This time, his tango partner has been the proto-fascist street-brawling gang called the Proud Boys, who he legitimized and embraced during Tuesday’s presidential debate by urging them to “stand back and stand by.”
On Wednesday, Trump performed the distancing-while-still-in-touch portion of the dance on the White House lawn with reporters, telling them: “I don't know who the Proud Boys are.” Even more telling: Trump, once again pressed to denounce white supremacists, again could not bring himself to actually say the words denouncing them.
First, Trump thoroughly confused everyone regarding where he stood with the Proud Boys: “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are. I mean, you’ll have to give me a definition, because I really don’t know who they are. I can only say they have to stand down, let law enforcement do their work. Law enforcement will do the work more and more. As people see how bad this radical, liberal, Democrat movement is and how weak — the law enforcement is going to come back stronger and stronger.”
But then a reporter tried to follow up with the main underlying question he had faced during the debate.
Q: So, Mr. President, let me follow up: White supremacists, they clearly love you and support you. Do you welcome that?
TRUMP: I want law and order to be a very important part—it’s a very important part of my campaign. And when I say that, what I’m talking about is law enforcement has to—the police have to take care. And they should stop defunding the police like they’ve done in New York—
Q: But I’m talking about white supremacists, sir.
TRUMP: —like they’ve done in New York. I just told you.
Q: But do you denounce them? Do you denounce white supr- —
TRUMP: I’ve always denounced any form—
Q: Of white supremacy?
TRUMP: Any form—any form of any of that, you have to denounce. But I also—and Joe Biden has to say something about antifa. It’s not a philosophy. These are people that hit people over the head with baseball bats. He’s got to come out and he’s got to be strong, and he’s got to condemn antifa. And it’s very important that he does that.
Just as he could not bring himself to do on Tuesday, Trump seems simply unable to say the words: “I unequivocally condemn all white supremacists and their associated hate groups.” He will utter simplified, secondhand denunciations—“Oh, I always disavow that,” or similarly anodyne and functionally meaningless words—that never convince anyone, especially white supremacists, that he means it.
This is a tango we have seen Trump dance many times. During the 2016 campaign, we were able to track his multiple dalliances with white nationalists and hatemongers of all stripes, and how he consistently used a kind of fuzzy disingenuousness to demur on the issue.
- When David Duke told his radio audience that voting against Trump was “really treason to your heritage.” When asked about it by CNN’s Jake Tapper, Trump danced around the question, saying he didn’t know enough about Duke or the Klan to disavow them. The alt-right viewed Trump’s subsequent remarks on MSNBC’s Morning Joe—”David Duke is a bad person who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years”—not as a sign of retreat, but as one of strength. Griffin described it on Occidental Dissent as a “disavowal,” in scare quotes, and applauded Trump’s “refusal to cuck and condemn ‘white supremacists’” more broadly.
- After two Boston men savagely beat a homeless Hispanic man and credited Trump for the inspiration (“Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” one of them told officers), Trump only glancingly voiced his disapproval (“I think that would be a shame”), and then rationalized the act: “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.”
- Trump’s disparagement of a Mexican American judge overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University brought similar condemnation. When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether implying a judge couldn’t do his job because of his heritage isn’t classic racism, he replied: "No, I don't think so at all."
- Trump’s retweet of an anti-Semitic image featuring a Star of David and a pile of cash that white nationalists used to smear Hillary Clinton. During the fallout from the latter, Trump went right along with the far right’s pushback that the star was simply a sheriff’s badge. Trump also refused to condemn the barrage of anti-Semitic attacks on journalist Julia Ioffe after she wrote an unflattering portrait of his wife, Melania Trump. “I don’t have a message to the fans,” Trump answered when asked if he wished to say anything to the anti-Semites attacking Ioffe. “A woman wrote an article that’s inaccurate.”
- When a white nationalist organization, American Freedom Party (AFP), began running robocalls in Utah supporting Trump, he spent the better part of a week avoiding any kind of disavowal of their activities, but finally did so by rationalizing them: “People are angry, they’re angry at what’s going on. They’re angry at the border, they’re angry at the crime,” he said.
Trump danced the tango on many occasions after he was elected as well. In the first three months after Trump won the presidency, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded an astonishing 1,372 hate incidents, nearly all of them election-related. A deep dive into the data reveals that nearly half of these incidents involve people referencing Trump, either by name or by parroting his rhetoric: groups of white thugs intimidating minorities while chanting “Trump,” for instance, or swastika graffiti accompanied by the words “Make America White Again.”
Asked whether he wished to denounce such acts, Trump constantly stonewalled and equivocated, shifted blame to the victims of the violence, and suggested that these acts were being faked by the left to make the right look bad. The pattern remained intact all the way through the Aug. 11 and 12, 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, when his initial response failed to call out the presence of neo-Nazis and white supremacists and passed off the violence as coming from “both sides.” This was followed by an official statement disavowing them, and then concluded by remarks at a press conference two days later in which he insisted that there were “very fine people on both sides” there.
As troubling as Trump’s dance steps might be, however, the much larger problem is how his remarks are viewed by white nationalists and other right-wing extremists themselves. Because these people uniformly rejoice over the first and final steps in the tango, and shrug off Trump’s unpersuasive moves to distance himself as mere political necessities.
“If he disavowed us, he did it, I thought, in the nicest possible way,” beamed white nationalist Jared Taylor after Trump’s unconvincing disavowal of the AFP robocalls on his behalf. AFP’s president called Trump’s response “wonderful … I couldn’t ask for a better approach.”
When Trump retweeted a post featuring the white nationalist hashtag #WhiteGenocide—and then dismissed critics by saying he couldn’t be expected to check out everyone he retweeted—the far right swooned in ecstasy. “Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full-wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters,” wrote neo-Nazi publisher Andrew Anglin on his website, The Daily Stormer.
Similarly, when Trump issued his official statement denouncing white supremacists the day after the Charlottesville violence, alt-right godfather Richard Spencer told reporters that he didn’t consider Trump’s disavowal a genuine denunciation: "His statement today was more kumbaya nonsense,” he sneered. “Only a dumb person would take those lines seriously."
Right-wing extremists were universally delighted by Trump’s subsequent remarks defending the Charlottesville marchers as “very fine people,” particularly his alt-right fan base. Anglin responded on social media: “He said he loves us all.” Duke thanked Trump for his “honesty and courage.”
Consistently, the radical right not only has embraced Trump’s signals in their direction as a form of empowerment, but it has positively marched in his name for the entirety of his tenure on the presidential stage. Defending Trump’s presidency and his policies, not to mention his politics, has in fact been the central organizing principle behind such far-right street-brawling groups as Patriot Prayer, American Guard, and especially the Proud Boys—who wear red Trump “Make America Great Again” hats as a key component of their uniforms.
Trump’s remarks on Tuesday night signaled that the affection is mutual—and that, moreover, Trump not only sees the Proud Boys as a welcome part of his base, but he believes he can command them to follow his marching orders. Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, remarked Wednesday on CNN that “if you look at who the Proud Boys are, they’re an army—they look like an army, they dress like an army, they behave like an army. And what flag are they carrying? They’re carrying the MAGA flag! So this is now, in Trump’s mind, this is Trump’s army.”
Proud Boys were hardly alone in feeling inspired. A broad spectrum of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other far-right extremists were elated by Trump’s embrace. Andrew Anglin crowed at the Stormer: “I got shivers. I still have shivers. He is telling the people to stand by. As in: get ready for war.”
And on 4chan—the online message board where both white nationalists and pro-Trump conspiracy theorists such as the QAnon cult gather in large numbers—the speculation ran wild. “Slaughtering leftists in droves will not be a punishable crime 2 months from now,” one wrote. Another referred to a longstanding far-right civil war fantasy in which “race traitors” are lynched en masse: “He told literal white supremacists to stand by. Day of the Rope confirmed November 3.”
Counterterrorism officials, who uniformly warn that the white nationalist right is the primary source of a terrorist threat to Americans in 2020, have been dismayed by Trump’s open embrace of the Proud Boys. Former Department of Homeland Security official Elizabeth Neumann told The Washington Post: “Extremists will assume he was sending them a signal last night.” Moreover, she emphasized, Trump is in fact perfectly aware of this reality.
“He legitimized them in a way that nobody in the community expected. It’s unbelievable. The celebration is incredible,” Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, told The Washington Post. “In my 20 years of tracking terrorism and extremism, I never thought I’d see anything like this from a U.S. president.”
Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University in North Carolina who tracks online extremism, told NBC News that Trump had fulfilled the Proud Boys’ long-sought "fantasy."
"To say Proud Boys are energized by this is an understatement," Squire said. "They were pro-Trump before this shoutout, and they are absolutely over the moon now. Their fantasy is to fight antifa in his defense, and he apparently just asked them to do just that."
