WHAT DOES IT SAY WHEN THE KKK IS ONE OF YOUR SUPPORTERS?

…These people think they can win with Trump.

 

When Trump says he has “diversified political support”, he’s not kidding.

 

I cannot imagine how I would feel if I were someone that was making white supremacist excited about my candidacy for President of the United States.  Fortunately, this is not the situation for Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio or Hillary Clinton.

 

But it is the case for the campaign of Donald J. Trump.

 

Staring this last weekend were the first of the pro-Trump robocalls by a white supremacist group called “American National Super PAC”.  There have been other robocalls, and they all are say about the same thing such as, ““We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people,” which was what the first robocall said, and this went out to Iowa and New Hampshire voters.

 

The same group’s pre-Super Tuesday call, which has gone out in Vermont and Minnesota, says, “The white race is dying out. . . . Few schools anymore have beautiful white children as the majority.” Both calls identify the person responsible for the message as a “farmer and white nationalist,” and both end the same way: “Vote Trump . . . This call is not authorized by Donald Trump.”

 

The racist American Freedom Party is actually running their own candidate for president on a “Stop White Genocide” ticket, but the group is clearly also with Trump.  In fact, a statement from the group announcing that first round of racist robocalls in Iowa called Trump “The Great White Hope.”

 

But all of this support does not stop with a couple of white supremacist groups.

 

Trump from the beginning has also had followers and supporters such as the American Nazi Party, the KKK-affiliated “Knights Party,” the skinhead and neo-Nazi online forum: “The Daily Stormer”.

 

However, this weekend, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, David Duke gave his overall endorsement to Mr. Trump.

 

Actually, the Grand Wizard started praising Trump via his radio show during last Summer.  He more than once stated that Trump’s campaign was doing “some incredibly great things.”  At the time, he stopped short of fully endorsing Trump’s candidacy.

 

However, Duke is now calling on his supporters to join the Trump campaign: “Voting against Donald Trump at this point, is really treason to your heritage. . . . I am telling you that it is your job now to get active. Get off your duff. Get off your rear-end that’s getting fatter and fatter for many of you every day on your chairs. When this show’s over, go out, call the Republican Party, but call Donald Trump’s headquarters, volunteer. They’re screaming for volunteers. Go in there, you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mind-set that you have.”

 

While on network television show this weekend, Donald Trump repeatedly refused to disavow the endorsement of the former grand wizard. But both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz took aim at Trump with this Grand Wizard endorsement.

 

Trump keeps blaming a bad interview ear piece in the interview with CNN where he refused to decline the endorsement.  He keeps saying he couldn’t hear the interviewers question and that he has previously disavowed the KKK’s endorsement.  But finally, the other Republican candidates are not letting Trump off the hook on this one.

 

We must remember that Trump is the same man that late last year also tweeted a graphic that showed inaccurate statistics blaming African Americans for anti-white crime. The graphic had come from a Twitter account with a stylized swastika that is the current symbol of a neo-Nazi group. The disgusting description of who the account belongs to includes the statement, “Should have listened to the Austrian chap with the little moustache.”  But without checking that the statistics in the graph were highly inaccurate, Trump went ahead and re-Tweeted it to his 6 million followers.

 

After Duke began supporting Trump, Trump told interviewers who pressed him to repudiate the Klansman, “Sure, I would, if that would make you feel better.”

 

However, Trump had once said that he disavowed Duke’s support, but he has now stated that he would not disavow him because he didn’t know who Duke was….?  He's confusing everyone.

 

When Duke ran for the Governor of Louisiana in 1991, mainstream Republicans were beside themselves that a KKK Klansman had become the party’s standard-bearer in that state. He was denounced by Republicans, up to and including the then-President George H.W. Bush.

 

Duke was defeated in Louisiana by the Democratic nominee Edwin Edwards.  But Edwards was so corrupt that he ultimately went on to serve eight years in federal prison.  It was a bazaar campaign where there were great political slogans.  For Edwards, people wore pins and signs said “Vote for the Crook. It’s important”  and there was “Vote for the Lizard, Not the Wizard”.  But at least, Duke did finally lose.

 

Reuters wrote last week, “A man wearing a shirt saying ‘KKK endorses Trump was thrown out of a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Oklahoma City, Okla. Trump responded with:  “In the good old days they would rip him out of that seat so fast, but today everybody is so politically correct, our country is going to hell with being so politically correct.”

 

The KKK and neo-Nazi’s have been around in fringe far-right US politics forever.  What is not usual for these groups is to actually be winning, and that’s what they are expecting from their support of Donald Trump.

 

What may have been the introduction of this kind of thinking was when Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) as a state legislator, once addressed the white supremacist European-American Unity and Rights Organization. Scalise says he had no idea that it was a racist group.  However, he also told a local reporter back then that Louisiana voters should think of him as “David Duke without the baggage.”

 

One would think that comments like that would be bad for someone within their political party.  But for Scalise, the Republicans have since elevate him to the No. 3 job in the House. 

 

The White House keeps bringing up the Scalise quote because it’s supposed to be a source of shame for him and for the party in choosing him as a leader.

 

Today, the Republican’s #1 polling candidate to date has both the attention and affection of the ugliest creatures in the American political swamp. 

 

I would say today that what Mr. Trump decides to do about this is a leadership test for both him and his party.

 

The point is that the KKK and the white nationalists must feel that the Republican Party has finally given them a candidate they can believe in.

 

So, what now?

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016