On the campaign trail, Trump has touted an Eisenhower-era deportation program known as Operation Wetback. He’s pointed to the deaths of Kathryn Steinle, a young white woman murdered in San Francisco, and Jamiel Shaw, a black high school football star killed in Los Angeles, as examples of the threat posed by undocumented immigrants. “We’re being attacked,” Trump said last August. “People are coming through the border that are really bad hombres.” His campaign issued press credentials to James Edwards, a white-supremacist radio host who interviewed one of Trump’s sons. In some interviews, Trump declined to repudiate racist supporters like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks says he has no knowledge of or affiliation with his far-right fan club. Trump, who composes his tweets on a Samsung smartphone, doesn’t always vet the profiles of the supporters he retweets, says Hicks, who notes the campaign was unaware of Edwards’ political views. “He has been very strong in his disavowal of all groups that espouse hatred,” she tells TIME.
White nationalists still think Trump is winking at them. “It would be difficult for all this to be an accident,” says Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily Stormer, a website with sections on the “Jewish problem” and “race war.” To Anglin, Trump represents a bridge to a new, pro-white populism. “Something has changed,” says the 31-year-old neo-Nazi from Columbus, Ohio. “He’s proven the Republican Party can no longer push an agenda that’s against white Americans for the benefit of the special interests they represent.”
THE WHITE ETHNOSTATE
Richard Spencer is ready to seize the moment. Spencer, 37, has devoted much of his adult life to forging a new path for white nationalism. “We need to present ourselves as serious and attractive,” he explains. “The type of people who can rule a country one day.”
Spencer is clean-cut, polite and solicitous. He spends his days on Twitter and Slack and peppers his paragraphs with academic jargon picked up during postgraduate studies at Duke and the University of Chicago. At the NPI meeting, where the tables were decorated with images of Trump’s golden mane, he wore a dark suit, a purple vest over a pink dress shirt and a distinctive haircut–shaved on the sides, longish on top–that has been widely mimicked by white nationalists.
Spencer strives to soften the edges of his ideology. He says he rejects white supremacy and considers slavery “abhorrent.” He calls himself an “identitarian,” a belief system that emphasizes racial identity and has much more in common with European far-right movements than anything cooked up by William F. Buckley and his cohort. But the preppy demeanor belies a radical vision: the establishment of a whites-only “ethnostate.”
It’s still just a fantasy, Spencer admits. But he’s not wrong to suggest that the rise of Trump, coupled with demographic trends and social crosscurrents, has imbued this cause with new momentum. The Black Lives Matter movement that took root in Ferguson, Mo., has fed a broader white-persecution complex. About 4 in 10 Americans–and nearly 75% of Trump supporters–say discrimination against whites is now as big a problem as discrimination against blacks, according to a November study by the Public Religion Research Institute. Attempts to stifle free speech on college campuses–where students seek out “safe spaces” and complain that chalking “Trump 2016” on the quad is an act of intimidation–seem to validate the candidate’s jeremiads against political correctness. Meanwhile, the GOP’s perpetual pursuit of policies like free trade, entitlement cuts and lower taxes for the wealthy has widened the gulf between party bosses and the base. “Conservatism is committing suicide,” Spencer says. “We want to fill that space.”
In the age of Trump, the emergence of a new nationalist third party no longer seems impossible. The GOP front runner has shattered so many taboos, smashed so many conservative idols, that to Spencer it feels as if a movement rooted in race and identity, rather than the Constitution and capitalism, is gathering steam. It may take years of fitful progress, he predicts, capped by some seismic shock–a sudden war, a stock-market crash. Or maybe just the arrival of a candidate like Donald Trump.
This appears in the April 25, 2016 issue of TIME.
(note, I gave time no money and never will)