New Yorker
By Evan Osnos
February 29, 2016
For
months, as Donald Trump developed his political repertoire, he adopted
an uncharacteristic reply for questions about fascism and the Ku Klux
Klan: silence, or something
close to it.
He
used the technique as early as last August, when his opponents, and the
press, still generally regarded him as a summer amusement. On August
26th, Bloomberg Television
anchor John Heilemann brought up David Duke, the former Klan Grand
Wizard, who had said that Trump was “the best of the lot” in the 2016
campaign. Trump replied that he had no idea who Duke was. Heilemann
asked if Trump would repudiate Duke’s endorsement.
“Sure,” Trump said, “if that would make you feel better, I would
certainly repudiate. I don’t know anything about him.” Changing tack,
Heilemann pressed Trump about an article in this magazine, which
described Trump’s broad support among neo-Nazis, white nationalists,
and other members of the far right who were drawn in by his comments
about Mexicans. Trump maintained a posture of indifference. “Honestly,
John, I’d have to read the story. A lot of people like me.” The
interview moved on to other topics.
It
should be noted that Trump’s unfamiliarity with Duke is a recent
condition. In 2000, Trump issued a statement that he was no longer
considering a run for President
with the backing of the Reform Party, partly because it “now includes a
Klansman, Mr. Duke.”
Throughout
last fall and into the winter, Trump continued to accumulate support
among white nationalists. In November, on a weekend in which he said
that a black protester,
at a rally in Alabama, deserved to be “roughed up,” Trump retweeted a
graphic composed of false racist statistics on crime; the graphic, it
was discovered, originated from a neo-Nazi account that used as its
profile image a variation on the swastika. In January,
he retweeted the account “@WhiteGenocideTM,” which identified its
location as “Jewmerica.” Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, a pro-Trump
robocall featured several white supremacists, including the author Jared
Taylor, who told voters, “We don’t need Muslims.
We need smart, well-educated white people.” Each time Trump was asked
on Twitter about his white nationalist supporters, the candidate, who is
ready to respond, day or night, to critics of his debating style or his
golf courses, simply ignored the question.
Only
under special circumstances did Trump summon a forceful response on
matters of the Klan: in January, BoingBoing unearthed a newspaper report
from 1927 on the arraignment
of a man with the name and address of Donald Trump’s father; the story
was about attendees of a Klan rally who fought with police, though it
wasn’t clear from the story why the Trump in the piece was arrested.
Asked about it, Donald Trump denied that his father
had had any connection to a Klan rally. “It’s a completely false,
ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took
place.”
But
recently, as Trump’s campaign has received much belated closer
scrutiny, his reliable approach to the Klan problem has faltered. On
Thursday, Duke offered his strongest
support for the candidate yet, telling radio listeners that a vote for
one of Trump’s rivals would be “treason to your heritage.” The next day,
when Trump had hoped to focus on his endorsement by Governor Chris
Christie, of New Jersey, a reporter shouted a
question about Duke’s embrace, and Trump said, “David Duke endorsed me?
O.K., all right, I disavow. O.K.?” For the moment, it worked, and the
press conference moved on. Christie, in fact, bore the brunt of the Duke
association: he appeared on the front page
of the Daily News on Saturday, as the “MAN WITH A KLAN,” with his
picture beside a group of hooded Klansmen. In a different spirit, the
Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi news site that long ago endorsed Trump,
awarded Christie the title “Heroic Deputy.” (Christie’s
overnight evolution from trashing Trump to obeying him repulsed even
the political class, a group that is usually more forgiving of
self-rationalization. The technology executive Meg Whitman, who had been
one of Christie’s top backers, called his alliance
with Trump “an astonishing display of political opportunism,” and asked
Christie’s donors and supporters “to reject the governor and Donald
Trump outright.”)
Over
the weekend, Trump’s purported indifference to support from white
supremacists and fascists became an inescapable problem. He had
retweeted a Mussolini quote from
@ilduce2016 (which, it turned out, was an account created by Gawker to
trap Trump)—“It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a
sheep”—and, when asked, on NBC, if he wanted to associate himself with
Mussolini, he said that he wanted “to be associated
with interesting quotes.” He added, “Mussolini was Mussolini. . . .
What difference does it make?” On CNN, Jake Tapper pressed him about
David Duke, and Trump, seeming to forget that he had given a one-line
disavowal, reverted to a position of theatrical incomprehension:
“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, O.K.?”
Tapper asked three times if Trump would denounce the Klan’s support,
and each time Trump declined. “I don’t know anything about what you’re
even talking about with white supremacy or white
supremacists,” he said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know—did he endorse
me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know
nothing about white supremacists.”
By
Monday, less than twenty-four hours before primary voting on Super
Tuesday, his non-answers about the Klan were creating a crisis, and
Trump introduced a new explanation:
audio trouble. “I’m sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad
earpiece that they gave me, and you could hardly hear what he was
saying,” he said on the “Today” show. “But what I heard was various
groups, and I don’t mind disavowing anybody, and I disavowed
David Duke and I disavowed him the day before at a major news
conference, which is surprising because he was at the major news
conference, CNN was at the major news conference, and they heard me very
easily disavow David Duke.”
There
may be no better measure of the depravity of this campaign season than
the realization that it’s not clear whether Trump’s overt appreciation
for fascism, and his
sustained salute to American racists, will have a positive or negative
effect on his campaign. For now, his opponents are rejoicing. Marco
Rubio, the Florida senator, pronounced him “unelectable.” Governor John
Kasich, of Ohio, called Trump’s comments “just
horrific.” But it is by now a truism to note that Trump has survived
pratfalls that other politicians have not. A surprisingly large portion
of Americans believed him when he pushed a racist campaign denying the
birthplace of Barack Obama; a comparably chilling
portion of Americans were attracted when he called Mexicans rapists. By
the end of the day on Sunday, he had received the endorsement of
Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, the first sitting senator to
officially line up with Trump. Sessions was not likely
to be bothered by Trump’s flirtations with the Klan. In 1986, he was
rejected from a federal judgeship after saying that he thought the Klan
was “O.K. until I learned they smoked pot.”
In
the weeks to come, Trump is virtually guaranteed to accumulate
additional endorsements from politicians like Christie and Sessions, who
have divined their interests
in drafting behind the strongest candidate for the Republican
nomination. Whether driven by fear of irrelevance, or attracted by the
special benefits of being an early adopter, Christie seemed compelled to
do it, and now the remnant of his political reputation
is going from a solid to a gas. But the true obscenity of his decision,
and those of other Trumpists, may take years to be fully appreciated.
In an editorial last week, the Washington Post declared that “history
will not look kindly on GOP leaders who fail
to do everything in their power to prevent a bullying demagogue from
becoming their standard-bearer.” That’s true, but history will judge
even more harshly those who stand with Trump now that it is indefensibly
clear with whom they are standing.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment