During the 2016 campaign, you may recall, there was often a notable press reluctance to acknowledge that many of Donald Trump's supporters were raging white supremacists. (The most infamous case was a PBS story profiling a Trump volunteer worker that somehow managed to avoid noting the prominent neo-Nazi and white supremacist symbols tattooed on both hands.)
Ah, the old days, when such things were even controversial. Welcome to 2020, when Donald Trump is getting campaign donations from prominent neo-Nazis and there's apparently not even a glimmer of thought that gosh, maybe Typhoid Hitler might not want to cash those particular checks.
At Popular Information, Judd Legum investigates some of the notorious white supremacists who have donated to Trump's campaign. Actual Neo-Nazi leader Morris Gulett, who believes "the Jew is the literal child of Satan," has given Trump at least $2,000. (Legum notes that Trump's campaign was asked about Gulett's donations over two years ago, but refused and refuses to respond.)
Other Trump campaign supporters include K.C. McAlpin, crackpot Peter Zieve, and (of course) rich racist Republican-backer Timothy Mellon, who's shoved $10 million at Trump's super PAC and $30 million towards getting Trump's enablers in the House and Senate reelected.
There's no chance Trump's campaign will be returning the money, of course. For starters, Donald Trump is a cheap, crooked man who goes to great lengths to avoid parting with cash. For seconders, the campaign needs the money, and if Trump's campaign of white nationalists backed down and returned money from known neo-Nazis there's no telling just how much money they'd end up having to give back. And for thirdsies, this isn't 2016. Trump's campaign isn't trying to hide their white nationalist ties. Trump himself isn't trying to hide his constant white nationalist incitements.
Trump's new "law and order" campaign theme, hastily plastered on top of the administration's massive and ongoing pandemic failures, has brought his support for white nationalism and its violence front and center. Trump's racist response to calls for police reform are now his campaign's primary message.
If anything, it's likely that Trump's embrace of prominent neo-Nazi leaders will not stop at taking their money this time around. Trump and his son Junior have been bolder in retweeting white nationalist and eliminationist themes. Trump's Fox News allies, including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, have been steadily ratcheting up their defenses of vigilante violence on Trump's behalf. We may yet see Trump standing on stage with one of these militia-uniformed goons before the campaign is out.
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