tags: , , , Blog

Evidence of Trump’s Repeated Efforts to Prioritize White Nationalism

Share This:

As we’ve written about before, Donald Trump and his administration are pursuing a blatantly white nationalist agenda, one that places great weight on white identity politics and is trying to thwart the current trajectory of American demographics. We see this in Trump’s two Muslim bans, designed to keep a whole category of individuals out; his indiscriminate immigration raids, intended to repel as well as expel immigrants; his vehemence against refugees; Steve Bannon’s origins as a white nationalist champion; and Jeff Sessions’ history as an opponent of civil rights and immigration reform.

And the evidence continues to accumulate. Below is an ongoing record of this administration’s efforts to prioritize white nationalism:

  • First and foremost, there was the decision to put Steve Bannon into a top position in the White House. Before Trump hired him for the campaign, Bannon ran Breitbart, which he called a mouthpiece for the “alt-right,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explains is “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”
  • In addition, Trump hired other hard-core anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim senior advisers including Stephen Miller, who drafted the Muslim Bans, and Sebastian Gorka, who may have been a sworn member of a Hungarian nazi-allied group.
  • Trump has threatened to defund cities that are friendly to immigrants, has published lists (containing misleading information) of immigrant-friendly cities, and has announced that such cities will be ineligible for DOJ grants.
  • In case you missed it, check out Sean Spicer at an Washington, DC Apple store in March, where an Indian-American woman asked him what it was like to work for a fascist, and he told her that America is “such a great country that allows you to be here.” (3/13/2017)
  • There’s “Camp of the Saints”, Steve Bannon’s apparent favorite book to reference, a wildly racist French novel which depicts immigrants as a mad horde, refusing to assimilate, committing crimes and murders, demanding handouts, overrunning whites, and forcing the capitulation of governments. “Camp of the Saints” was also a favorite of John Tanton, the so-called grandfather of the anti-immigrant movement. (3/4/2017)
  • Trump has created the Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement office, or VOICE, and is publishing lists of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. (3/1/2017)
  • Trump dismissed signs and bomb threats against Jewish community centers and schools as “false flag” operations: “Some of the signs you’ll see are not put up by the people that love or like Donald Trump,” Trump said at a press conference. “Some of those signs and some of that anger is caused by the other side. They’ll do signs, and they’ll do drawings that are inappropriate. It won’t be my people. It will be the people on the other side to anger people like you.” (2/28/2017)
  • There’s the time that Kellyanne Conway retweeted a white nationalist who has also posted derogatory tweets about black women, about there being “no majority white countries left on earth”, and about diversity being a “Jewish lie”. (2/14/2017)
  • There’s the evidence that Trump & co are planning to reduce legal as well as undocumented immigration. This fits neatly into what commentators have described as Trump’s overall goal of reducing “large numbers of foreigners”, which he believes are “harmful to U.S. society.”
    • Before his joint address to Congress in February, Trump initially put out the word that he was interested in immigration reform — before giving a speech that only mentioned curtailing legal immigration, and ignored the question of what to do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here. (2/28/2017)
    • Leaked draft memos have suggested that Trump was planning executive orders relating to worker visas (2/7/2017)
    • Sen. Tom Cotton (who is supportive of Trump) has introduced the RAISE Act, which would cut the number of family-based green cards issued each year in half, from about 1,000,000 to 500,000. (2/7/2017)
  • The Trump administration’s plan to rebrand a program known as “Combating Violent Extremism” as “Combating Islamic Extremism”, which commentators have decried as once again slandering Muslims while showing domestic white extremists that Trump won’t target them at all (2/3/2017).
  • Trump was silent after a Quebec City shooting in which a white man killed six inside a Canada mosque, despite the fact that he often tweets about terror and violence in general. (2/2/2017)
  • Don’t forget Trump’s statement commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which he did not mention the Jews, instead choosing to take into account “all of those who suffered” — in a genocide that targeted Jews directly. (1/30/2017)
  • There’s Trump’s original Muslim ban, in which he targeted seven majority-Muslim countries (even though no citizens of those countries have fatally harmed Americans) — and declared that the US was going to prioritize Christian refugees. (1/29/2017)
  • And there are the old-but-infamous Jeff Sessions quotes: how he once agreed with a white judge that a white civil rights lawyer was a “disgrace to his race”, and a Senate floor speech in which he declared that “Fundamentally, almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming because they have a skill that would benefit us and that would indicate their likely success in our society.” (11/16/2016)