Morning Mix

How Donald Trump is breathing life into America’s dying white supremacist movement

By Peter Holley and Sarah Larimer December 21 at 8:30 AM
@peterjholley
@slarimer

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For large numbers of Americans, Trump’s rhetoric surrounding immigration, minority groups and crime may sound like finely tuned retrograde vitriol. But for {Rachel Pendergraft, the national organizer for the Knights Party, a standard-bearer for the Ku Klux Klan} and a growing number of white nationalists flocking to the campaign’s circus-like tent, the billionaire sounds familiar, like a man fluent in the native tongue of disaffected whites.

It’s a language people such as Pendergraft never thought they’d hear a mainstream politician in either party use in public. ... And they’re desperately hoping Trump’s rise from reality-show figure to Republican front-runner may be the beginning of something that transcends the campaign trail.

The same rhetoric that frightens critics (“Trump has really lifted the lid off a Pandora’s box of real hatred and directed it at Muslims,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok) draws praise from supporters such as former Louisiana politician and KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
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Trump does not endorse white supremacist groups and his campaign has fired two staffers for posting racially offensive material on social media. The candidate recently shocked some conservatives by criticizing Justice Antonin Scalia after Scalia argued that black students would perform better in “slower-track” universities. ... “I thought it was very tough to the African American community, actually,” Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper.