I still think the best description of Trump was that he plays "footsie" with the far right vote.
"Many breathed a sigh of relief on 20 January 2021, when Joe Biden officially became President of the United States, after a tumultuous few weeks between…"
www.gale.com
>>>The 5th era of far-right activity saw groups go ‘underground and offline’ (Winter, 2019), regarding the internet as free from government oversight or control. The far right’s online presence was mixed, with innovation
[1] dependent on the national context: a number of sites took advantage of the affordance of the internet to spread propaganda, expand networks, and connect previously scattered individuals. The online presence of the far right evolved with the internet, moving from bulletin boards, to websites and forums, to the social media platforms that have since come to dominate. Winter has noted how key events, such as the election of Obama in 2008, gave an initial boost to the far right as it provided a clear rallying call. Social media and the internet more generally helped the diffusion of propaganda and manifestos, such as in the case of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people in a series of attacks in 2011, including 69 young left-wing activists on the island of Utøya. This was also witnessed after the terrorist attack in 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand, when Australian Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims at a mosque. His manifesto, as well as images of the numerous symbols drawn on his weapons, quickly spread across the Internet and resonated across far-right communities.
In this context, Trump’s candidacy and campaign in 2016 allowed for the different strands of far and extreme right to converge under one banner, as he was not only the candidate of the Grand Old Party, but also closely allied with the new kid on the far-right block: the alt-right. Trump also received support from traditional extreme-right movements and actors such as David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Proud Boys.
The alt-right, a term first used in 2008 by white nationalist Richard Spencer, was initially seen as a new branding for a neo-conservative, explicitly racial reaction to traditional conservatism. For the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), this ‘new’ movement represented ‘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’. Denying the racism of the movement, ‘members’ claimed to ‘simply’ be engaging with identity politics, victimised by ‘reverse racism’, demands for equality and political correctness. The alt-right did not represent a true movement with cohesive goals, membership or purpose. Instead, it is understood to be an amalgamation of beliefs, revolving around support for explicit white supremacist, nationalist, and fascist politics. As such, it operates more like a spectrum than a movement or party, as suggested by the term alt-lite used to define ‘less’ extreme actors.
In 2016, the alt-right gained prominence through media interest and active engagement with the Presidential Election. One of the key alt-right spaces, r/the_donald on Reddit, even hosted a Question-and-Answer session
[2] with a number of campaign staff, including Donald Trump. It became a space that reflected the President himself: a rejection of any semblance of reasonable political discussion. Anonymous swarms of alt-right trolls would swamp hashtags and dominate platforms with their messaging, attempting to drown out dissenting opinions. It is worth noting here that r/the_donald, and other similar threads, have since been shut down in an effort to counter extremism on social media platforms and head off controversy in advance of the 2020 election – what was acceptable in the lead up to Trump’s election has since become beyond the pale. This has led to more overtly far-right platforms, such as Parler, gaining the attention Reddit received in 2016.
In 2016, the alt-right was a jubilant cheerleader for Trump, a candidate considered for a number of months to be somewhat of a joke, attracting many who claimed to have joined the movement ironically or subversively. As the campaign progressed, the alt-right fuelled and was fuelled by a venomous discourse of toxic masculinity and racism, epitomised by their branding of opposition conservatives as ‘cuckservatives’. Legitimising the connection, Trump ultimately hired alt-right individuals such as Steve Bannon, then editor of
Breitbart. As such, its actors gained prominence in the campaign and access to government during the Trump presidency; alt-right discourse became mainstreamed, if not altogether mainstream. For example, it became increasingly common to hear adversaries, no matter how moderate, denounced as traitors to the nation trying to institutionalise Socialism and open borders.
As the events that took place in Charlottesville in August 2017 demonstrated, the far and extreme-right threat was not just an online phenomenon. As neo-Nazis and other extreme-right activists took to the streets, the murder of anti-fascist Heather Heyer made clear that threats of violence were not ironic banter. Trump’s reaction to these events blurred the boundaries between the extreme and far right and the mainstream further, as he refused to outright condemn the fascist event, instead declaring that ‘you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides’. The false equivalence between fascists and the mythologised and misunderstood ‘Antifa’ would become a cornerstone of Trump’s discourse.<<<
