White Nationalists “Hail” Trump With Nazi Salutes – And Team Trump Shrugs
In recent days, events have reignited the most disturbing speculation about the nature of the incoming Trump regime, its ideological orientation, and the political character of the president-elect himself.
Over the weekend, an organization that calls itself the National Policy Institute convened a couple of hundred white nationalists and other disreputable elements of the self-styled “alt-right” in Washington to celebrate the election of Donald Trump.
While this outfit’s leader, Richard Spencer, sought to present its racist program publicly in the most anodyne terms, a video of his closing speech — shot by a documentary team working for The Atlantic magazine — showed him shouting “Hail Trump” as followers saluted with their arms thrust out, just like old-time Nazis. Spencer’s remarks suggested that Jews are not human, and quoted the old Nazi term “luegenpresse” in “the original German,” as he put it, to lambast the “lying press.”
When that video surfaced on Monday, the deceptive branding of “alt right,” a thin scrim invented for social media, was scraped away to reveal the restless Nazi maggots underneath. Such a revolting spectacle should have upset Trump, still trying to stabilize his awkward transition to power, because the president-elect’s “chief strategist” Steve Bannon has boasted of transforming his media company, Breitbart.com, into “a platform for the alt right.” And the “alt right” Nazis welcomed Bannon’s appointment when it was announced last week.
But just as Trump himself hesitated to renounce an endorsement from former KKK leader David Duke earlier this year, his team’s official response to the uproar over the Spencer video was unspecific and pathetically weak:
President-elect Trump has continued to denounce racism of any kind and he was elected because he will be a leader for every American. To think otherwise is a complete misrepresentation of the movement that united Americans from all backgrounds.
Considering how jealously Trump seeks to protect his image, his silence about the neo-Nazi appropriation of his trademarked name is strange. Rather than blast the sieg-heiling creeps on Twitter, he let his spokesperson’s tepid statement stand.
Now contrast that bland reaction to Trump’s weekend Twitter rage over the Hamilton incident, where Vice President-elect Mike Pence listened to a brief and cordial plea for fairness and decency from Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr in the hit Broadway musical.
“Apologize!” shrieked Trump in a series of furious tweets that went on for two days — even though Pence denied he had been offended at all, and urged everyone to see the play (which is indeed brilliant and beautiful, inspiring renewed fascination with the nation’s revolutionary history and founders among Americans of all ages).
No, the neo-Nazi salutes didn’t seem to bother Trump nearly as much as that sassy multiracial musical cast.
Perhaps his inappropriate reaction to these incidents is merely another symptom of his profound insecurity and bloated vanity. But the longer he allows white nationalists to decorate their propaganda with his name, while refusing to denounce them directly, the more suspicion he provokes about his own ideology and intentions.
