I have previously written my belief that Trump’s reluctance to denounce hate groups and individuals during his presidential campaign as now is simply because our President is a white nationalist and racist, and he believes that he is superior to others. Hate groups are Trump’s people.
Do I think the president bears some responsibility for what happened in Charlottesville? Absolutely yes. When you have a president that doesn’t have the guts to say for two days what the vast majority of the people understand to be true – that white supremacy and Neo-Nazism have got to be condemned – two days after a white supremacist demonstration where someone was killed, the message he is sending out to racists and Neo-Nazis all over the country is this is okay.
And Slates’ Ben Mathis-Lilley writes, “Donald Trump has done more than any political figure in the United States to propagate the beliefs and court the support of the white supremacist "alt-right" movement, whose adherents held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, where a white supremacist named James Fields Jr. killed a nonviolent protester named Heather Heyer with his car. Here's an attempt at a comprehensive list of the ways Trump has promoted and benefited from the movement.”
(Here are itemized headings of Mathis-Lilley's list)
Birtherism: President Barack Obama was not an American.
Steve Bannon: Trump’s alt-right senior advisor.
Milo Yiannopoulo: The Nazi-fetishizing former Breitbart staffer who worked for Bannon.
Alex Jones: Jones' site InfoWars advocates paranoid beliefs of all sorts, including but not limited to alt-right-adjacent theories. White House seemingly confirmed to the New York Times that Trump and Jones occasionally speak on the phone.
Sebastian Gorka: Serves as a deputy assistant to President. He is reportedly a member of a far-right Hungarian group called Vitézi Rend that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. (He denies it.)
Julie Kirchner: Previously the executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Kirchner was appointed to work at the federal Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services by the Trump administration She complained that immigration undermines whites' dominance.
Social media outreach: Trump once answered a question submitted by Milo Yiannopoulos, and another user whose question he answered had previously referred to Black Lives Matter protests as "chimp outs." Other threads on The_Donald prior to Trump's Q&A had covered such subjects as "race mixing," Nazis' allegedly high IQs, and the "Jewish influence" in America.
Saying and doing racist things constantly: During the 2016 campaign, among many other racial comments and accusations, Trump asserted that Mexican immigrants are disproportionately likely to commit rapes; defended the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
