Greg Sargent at The Washington Post has a column out this week that damningly synthesizes some of the biggest questions around President Trump’s relationship to a terrifying recrudescence of white nationalism and right-wing extremism. He poses the question of whether Trump’s rhetoric is “emboldening white-nationalist and white supremacist activity at home and abroad,” and the experts and studies he consults indicate that this is chillingly the case. Sargent provides a concise overview of some of the most crucial issues around the Trump-white supremacism nexus, including the growing international nature of this crisis and the undeniable way in which Trump is untroubled by providing aid and comfort to this anti-democratic and violent movement.
This little passage from an interview Sargent conducted a few months ago with Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst, is a provocative and upsetting distillation of how Trump’s words and actions overlap with those of white nationalists:
Building a border wall, deporting immigrants, a travel ban on Muslim countries — these are themes discussed on white-nationalist message boards and websites for years, now being endorsed and talked about at the highest levels of the government. He’s retweeted messages about Muslims from conspiracy sites. What keeps these groups energized and active is the fact that the administration has mainstreamed their message and tried to put it forth as policy.
The fact that Donald Trump has “mainstreamed” the most noxious white nationalist positions into his governing agenda should come as a shocking wake-up call to most Americans. Although Sargent maintains an admirable lack of judgment in posing the question of why Trump appears untroubled by acting as essentially an ally to these backwards and violent forces, it’s hard not to conclude that Trump does so because he’s in agreement with their aims. After all, the president has already made some of their major goals his own.
So there’s no longer any real question as to whether there is an unacceptable and hateful synergy between this presidency and white nationalism. The question we are well past time needing to move on to, and answer, is what Americans are going to do about it. I have been seeing this point made here and there by various commentators, and I couldn’t agree more: one of the first orders of business is to bring all possible light to bear on this obscene political convergence. This needs to be done by the press, by politicians, and by the public. Pieces like Sargent’s are essential to a remedy: even if Sargent pulls his punches a little, the questions he asks are devastating, because the answers really are staring us all in the face.
But a decisive and concerted response by the Democrats is equally necessary. It’s heartening to see that, in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks, the House Judiciary Committee is planning to hold hearings on white nationalism in the United States. It may feel like the Trump Administration has already provoked a plethora of investigations by the new House majority, but few can be counted more important than this one. I will not say that the white nationalist movement cannot survive broad public exposure, but I’m sure that most Americans will be shocked to learn of the rapid rise and spread of this movement in recent decades, and will be repulsed by obvious links between its hateful ideology and the policies and rhetoric of this administration. And I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the Democrats’ credibility as a political party is on the line here. If the party of multiculturalism and a future that brings broad prosperity does not view a growing white supremacist movement as an existential threat to both American democracy and the party’s political goals, then it is time for a new progressive party.
Likewise, if the Democrats fail to grasp the rare alignment between defense of the nation, and the need to hold President Trump and the GOP at large responsible for coddling and encouraging white supremacists, then there is likewise little hope for the party’s future. It seems obvious that a president and a party that have no problem embracing ideologies that lead seamlessly to dehumanization of and violence towards vast swathes of the U.S. population must be defeated and discredited at every opportunity. This is not simply because these ideas are the antithesis of what most Americans believe, but because they threaten the foundations of American society and politics themselves. A country where Muslims constantly fear for their lives; where white nationalists can seize and trash federal facilities without repercussion (as happened here in Oregon a couple years ago); where Jews at worship can be killed by a gunman inspired by theories given credence by the president: this is not a country where all creeds and colors are equal, and free to live their lives as they please. And this is to say nothing of the non-violent but clearly anti-democratic tools with which the GOP has targeted minority, young, and poorer voters for years, such as voter suppression and gerrymandering, which must be seen as being on a continuum that joins up with extremist ideology at a point that feels harder and harder to clearly define.
I noted Sargent’s interview with Daryl Johnson, who is actually a pretty significant figure in the story of white nationalism’s rise over the the last couple decades. This is because back in 2009, while working at the Department of Homeland Security, Johnson authored an intelligence report on the rise of right-wing extremist and violence in the United States. The report provoked a minor controversy at the time - and which has become retroactively far more significant - as congressional Republicans objected to the idea of “right-wing” extremism, and also bizarrely took offense at evidence that white nationalists were targeting members of the U.S. military for recruitment. The controversy turned into backlash, as Johnson described in a 2017 Washington Post op-ed:
Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.
I suspect we’ll be hearing more about Johnson’s 2009 report in the coming months, as both the report and the GOP panic over it now appear to be a turning point in the U.S. government’s botched response to what has become the premier extremist threat to American security. One would hope that the Democrats will make that report, and the GOP response to it, a prime exhibit in making the case that the Republican Party has at best fumbled America’s response to a grave danger, and at worst played a decisive role in its continuing rise. If we are to navigate out of this horror show without too much more damage, we are going to need to tell the whole, true story of how we got to this shitty crossroads.