Don’t Believe Trump When He Claims He’s Not Racist

Former president Donald Trump often finds himself on the defensive against accusations of racism. He regularly denies the charges, distorting his record and resorting to his “Black friends” defense, while attempting to throw the allegations back at liberals. However, he never explains why he is the favorite son of the one group in society about whose racial bigotry there can be no debate: avowed racists.

Since Trump emerged as a public political figure, they have been resolute in their loyalty to him. Are Trump’s African American allies like Senator Tim Scott or Representative Byron Donalds, or Latino ones like Senator Marco Rubio, truly ignorant of his unapologetically racist champions? Or is their blind ambition to share a ticket with him (or be close to power) simply more important to them?

In 2016, when Donald Trump first ran for president, just about every self-declared white nationalist, white supremacist, Klansman, neo-Nazi, and fascist in the country supported his candidacy. And that’s no exaggeration.

One of the longest-running white nationalist journals in the United States, American Renaissance, is edited by notorious racist Jared Taylor. In January 2016, during the primary race in Iowa, he circulated a robocall that stated, “I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America. We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated White people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

Trump was also cheered on by the Ku Klux Klan’s official newspaper, The Crusader, which calls itself the “Political Voice of White Christian America.” Though it said that it wasn’t necessarily endorsing Trump, its urge to ally with him was all too clear. Under the front-page headline banner “Make America Great Again,” Pastor Thomas Robb wrote, “While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What made America great in the first place?’ The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did—but because of who our forefathers were.… America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great.”

And then there was the David Duke crisis. On February 24, 2016, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Duke stated to his white radio audience, “Voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage.” When Trump was later asked on CNN about his support from the then-most-famous racist in the nation, his reply was, “Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. OK? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don’t know.” Not exactly an unequivocal denunciation.

And not true in the least. Trump, who claims the best brain and greatest memory on earth, suddenly got amnesia when it came to the way he had spoken out against Duke in 1991 when that figure ran for governor of Louisiana, and, in 2000, when Trump rejected affiliation with the Reform Party in part because of its links to Duke. At the time, he called Duke a “bigot” and a “racist.”

Trump conveniently forgot that past history of his during that CNN interview, as he clearly calculated the nature of his base and where it overlapped with Duke’s. After blaming a faulty earpiece (which, curiously enough, seemed to work fine for the rest of the interview) and evidently fearing swift blowback, Trump rejected Duke’s support the next day.

Duke, however, was undeterred and continued to back him in an enthusiastic fashion. After the election, he even tweeted, “Make no mistake about it, our people played a HUGE role in electing Trump!”

Other racists celebrated as well. At a gathering in Washington, DC, Richard Spencer, leader of the white supremacist alt-right movement, declared: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” He was speaking to a crowd of nearly 200, many of whom responded with Nazi salutes. You won’t be surprised to know that they expressed no confusion about what Trump represented.

“Stand Back and Stand By”

In August 2017, within months of being in office, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, produced a clear opportunity for Trump to denounce racists, Neo-Nazis, and Klansmen who marched to the chants of “White lives matter“ and “Jews will not replace us.” Instead, unlike nearly every other elected official on the national scene, Democrat or Republican, he flubbed his response. After a press conference or two, where he equivocated and went off-script to wax admiringly about “very fine people on both sides,” he ultimately denounced the far-right racists. However, he pointedly agreed with their demand that generated the march in the first place—their objection to the removal of the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a city park. Trump has decried the dismantling of Lee statues on a number of occasions, including in Charlottesville, where he called it “sad” and “so foolish.”

In 2020, after four years in office, he arguably received even stronger and more violent support from his far-right and white nationalist backers. Those years included his anti-(non-white-)immigrant fight to “build the wall” on the US-Mexican border, his rejection of immigrants from the “shithole countries” of the Global South, the aspersions he cast on Black-dominated cities, and his endless racist statements about Black athletes, elected officials, women, and protesters.

Then, of course, during the 2020 election campaign, far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Boys, and others—many with openly racist members in their ranks—rallied around Trump and became his frontline soldiers after he lost. He famously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” but not to stand down. They showed up at most “Stop the Steal” events and were front and center during the January 6 insurrection, where Black police officers reported being called the “n-word.” Trump now refers to that same crew as “warriors” and “patriots,” ignoring the Confederate flags, antisemitic symbols, racial slurs, and nooses that were ubiquitous that day.

In 2020, some in the racist community were smarter in signaling their support for Trump without formally endorsing him. David Duke, however, once again unabashedly came out for him, while suggesting that disgraced media propagandist and ex–Fox News host Tucker Carlson be added to the ticket as his vice-presidential choice. Carlson seemed like a particularly sensible possibility to Duke because, even while at Fox, he had been a proponent of the “white replacement theory,” the argument that undocumented (and even documented) immigrants of color are part of a larger conspiracy by unidentified liberals and Democrats to supplant white Americans and white American culture with something distinctly (and all too literally) darker and more disturbing. Of course, Trump subscribed to that thesis as well.

The “Anti-White-Feeling” Former President

In 2024, there is little doubt whom the nation’s racists will once again be backing for president. Only recently, Trump spewed lies and misrepresentations at a—yes!—white-dominated gathering in an obscure Black church in Detroit, while denouncing that city as “hell” and “totally corrupt,” and describing black communities as dangerous and depressed. He did not, however, repeat for that crowd and representatives of the national media present that day his pledge to address so-called anti-white racism or to make it a priority should he become president again. As he said in a Time magazine interview, “If you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white [people] and that’s a problem.” He offered no examples of that “problem,” but it fit in squarely with the belief of 58 percent of his supporters that “racial minorities” are favored over whites in the United States.