If Donald Trump has done anything consistently in the year he’s run for president, it’s play nice with white supremacists.
That’s not to call Trump a bigot; it’s impossible to know what’s in his heart. But what Trump feels is less important than what he does. As a real estate developer and casino owner, he was sued for breaking anti-discrimination laws. During Barack Obama’s first term, he
accused the president of foreign birth, blasting him as illegitimate and unfit to lead. And as a presidential candidate, he’s called for racist policies—
surveillance and heightened scrutiny of Muslim Americans, a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States—and adopted racist rhetoric.
That rhetoric goes beyond the early (and false) claim that Mexico was sending “rapists” to the United States under the guise of immigration, beyond his attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel for his Hispanic heritage. Trump, who relies on social media to drive his message, has used his enormous Twitter platform to amplify racist and white supremacist messages. He’s retweeted
anti-black memes,
white nationalist writers, and users with handles like
whitegenocideTM. And over the holiday weekend, Trump
tweeted an anti-Semitic image of Hillary Clinton, complete with a Star of David placed on a background of cash. “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” read the star, which evoked old stereotypes of Jewish greed and avarice. The image wasn’t a Trump original—it
came directly from a neo-Nazi Twitter account. The Trump campaign tried to claim it was a sheriff’s star, in an absurd attempt to dismiss the outrage as “political correctness.”
Zoom out and the picture is even more disturbing. In
one comprehensive analysis of Trump campaign accounts—from Trump’s own to that of staffers and surrogates—
Fortune magazine found that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has retweeted at least 75 users who follow “influencers” for the “#WhiteGenocide” hashtag, the rallying cry of racists who believe there’s an effort to eliminate the “white race.” In turn, a majority of those accounts are followed by more than a hundred such influential users. Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman—
who is black herself—follows the most influential “#WhiteGenocide” account on Twitter. And that’s just one example.