Making friends is no easy task for modern white nationalists.
In an era of gay marriage and a black president, more than a half-century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, separatists can’t exactly swan-dive into conversations with strangers about the white-power cause.
But Rachel Pendergraft — the national organizer for the Knights Party, a standard-bearer for the Ku Klux Klan — told The Washington Post that the KKK, for one, has a new conversation starter at its disposal.
You might call it a “Trump card.”
It involves, say, walking into a coffee shop or sitting on a train while carrying a newspaper with a Donald Trump headline. The Republican presidential candidate, Pendergraft said, has become a great outreach tool, providing separatists with an easy way to start a conversation about issues that are important to the dying white supremacist movement.
“One of the things that our organization really stresses with our membership is we want them to educate themselves on issues, but we also want them to be able to learn how to open up a conversation with other people,” Pendergraft said.
Using Trump as a conversation piece has been discussed on a private, members-only website and in “e-news, stuff that goes out to members.”
In addition to opening “a door to conversation,” she said, Trump’s surging candidacy has done something else: It has electrified some members of the movement.
“They like the overall momentum of his rallies and his campaign,” Pendergraft said. “They like that he’s not willing to back down. He says what he believes, and he stands on that.”
For large numbers of Americans, Trump’s rhetoric surrounding immigration, minority groups and crime may sound like finely tuned retrograde vitriol. But for Pendergraft and a growing number of white nationalists flocking to the campaign’s circus-like tent, the billionaire sounds familiar, like a man fluent in the native tongue of disaffected whites.
It’s a language people such as Pendergraft never thought they’d hear a mainstream politician in either party use in public.
And they’re desperately hoping Trump’s rise from reality-show figure to Republican front-runner may be the beginning of something that transcends the campaign trail.
The same rhetoric that frightens critics (“Trump has really lifted the lid off a Pandora’s box of real hatred and directed it at Muslims,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok) draws praise from supporters such as former Louisiana politician and KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
Duke said that although he has not officially endorsed Trump, he considers the candidate to be the “best of the lot” at the moment.
“I think a lot of what he says resonates with me,” Duke said.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests from The Post seeking comment about the candidate’s support among white supremacists.
But he previously brushed off Duke’s support, telling Bloomberg News: “I don’t need his endorsement; I certainly wouldn’t want his endorsement. I don’t need anyone’s endorsement.” When Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin and John Heilemann asked whether he would repudiate Duke’s support, Trump replied: “Sure, I would, if that would make you feel better.”
Trump does not endorse white supremacist groups, and his campaign has fired two staffers for posting racially offensive material on social media. The candidate recently shocked some conservatives by criticizing Justice Antonin Scalia after Scalia argued that black students would perform better in “slower-track” universities.
“I thought it was very tough to the African-American community, actually,” Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
For years, Trump has bragged about having a “great relationship with the blacks.” Last month, he held private meetings with dozens of African-American evangelical pastors at Trump Tower in Manhattan and told reporters he saw “love in that room.”
But the meeting was subsequently criticized by more than 100 black ministers, theologians and religious activists who penned a letter questioning why their colleagues would agree to sit down with a candidate who “routinely uses overtly divisive and racist language on the campaign trail.”
As this primary season of fear and anger has progressed, Trump’s rallies have occasionally made headlines for rowdy, mostly white crowds and ugly outbursts.
Stormfront, one of the most popular white nationalist websites, claims that a surge of Trump-inspired traffic has forced administrators to upgrade their servers, according to Politico.
Site founder Don Black told The Post that Trump has “inspired an insurgency” for users of the site and listeners of a Stormfront radio show.
“It’s all very surprising to me,” Black said. “I would have never expected he be the great white hope, of all people. But it’s happening. So that’s what we talk about. That’s what so many of our people are inspired by.”
