The Destructionists by Dana Milbank

Author:Dana Milbank [Milbank, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

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AFTER TRUMP’S 2016 WIN, prominent white supremacists exulted. David Duke boasted that “our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump” and the head of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer bragged that “we did this.” They saw the appointment of Steve Bannon as top Trump strategist as evidence that Trump would be repaying the debt.

“We have a psychic connection, or you can say a deeper connection, with Donald Trump in a way that we simply do not have with most Republicans,” Richard Spencer told The New York Times at the time. “We’ve crossed the Rubicon in terms of recognition” for white nationalists. “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

Politico quoted Spencer saying the alt-right was “a head without a body” and “the Trump movement was a body without a head.” Now, “I think, moving forward, the alt-right can, as an intellectual vanguard, complete Trump.” And the Los Angeles Times quoted Spencer saying that Trump’s election was an “awakening” and that “we’re not quite the establishment now, but I think we should start acting like it.”

Trump earned praise from Spencer, David Duke, and the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer for his talk about Charlottesville and “shithole” countries and a border wall. He flew to Nashville to visit the tomb of Andrew Jackson and took up the campaign to prevent Harriet Tubman from replacing the man nicknamed “Indian killer” on the $20 bill. The Daily Stormer, which now proclaimed itself “the new face of the Republican Party,” called it “fitting” for Trump to honor this “White supremacist extremist.”

Trump also embraced the language of white supremacists in talking about immigrants “breeding” like insects. Trump appointee Carl Higbie resigned from his post at AmeriCorps after the publishing of his earlier complaints that Black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.” Spencer’s National Policy Institute had warned of white “displacement by the subject race through differential fertility rates and interracial breeding.” Alex Jones’s InfoWars, which Trump touted, had published headlines saying things such as “Top Imam: Muslim Migrants Should Breed with Europeans to ‘Conquer Their Countries.’ ”

Trump further tugged the heartstrings of white nationalists with his vows to preserve Confederate symbols as part of “our proud American heritage.” He claimed that the “culture of our great country [was] being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues” of Confederate heroes (the statues had been erected long after the Civil War as symbols of resilient white power). Trump held an event at the White House to highlight murders committed by illegal immigrants, and participants used the forum to direct people to a website touting white nationalist claims of “genocide” and a “Holocaust” being perpetrated against white Americans, and a convoluted conspiracy theory about attempts to lure “new citizens for the country to replace us, the American people.”

Trump stocked his administration with white nationalists and their allies. The chief White House economic adviser hosted a publisher of white nationalists.

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