Trump has repeatedly been endorsed by white supremacist groups and other
far-right extremists, and they've looked to him as a source of
encouragement
Analysis by John Haltiwanger

President Donald Trump's refusal to explicitly condemn white
supremacist groups during Tuesday night's debate follows a similar pattern.

Extremism experts warn that Trump gave a boost to the far-right group
known as the Proud Boys by mentioning them during the debate.

Trump's racist, xenophobic rhetoric has frequently been viewed as a
source of encouragement by white nationalist and far-right extremist
groups.

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Bull

President Donald Trump refused to explicitly condemn white supremacist
groups during the first 2020 presidential debate on Tuesday, instead opting
to issue a rallying cry to a far-right extremist group with a history of
engaging in street violence.

"Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups
and to say that they need to stand down?" debate moderator Chris Wallace
asked.

"Proud Boys, stand back and stand by! But I'll tell you what, somebody's
got to do something about antifa and the left," Trump said, after
additional prompting from former Vice President Joe Biden.

The Proud Boys are a far-right group of self-described "western
chauvinists." The group has rejected the notion that it promotes white
supremacy, even as its leaders regularly share white nationalist memes and
"maintain affiliations with known extremists," according to the Southern
Poverty Law Center. The SPLC considers the Proud Boys to be a hate group.

The Anti-Defamation League describes the Proud Boys ideology as:
"Misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration. Some members
espouse white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies and/or engage with
white supremacist groups."

The Proud Boys have frequently been involved in street violence, and a
former Proud Boys member helped organize the "Unite the Right" rally that
prompted deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.

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After Trump's comments during the Tuesday night debate, far right groups
took to social media to celebrate, and experts on extremism warned that the
president essentially just helped the Proud Boys recruit.

Rita Katz, the executive director of SITE intelligence Group, which tracks
far-right groups, told the Washington Post that Trump "legitimized" the
Proud Boys in a way that "nobody in the community expected."

"It's unbelievable. The celebration is incredible," Katz said. "In my 20
years of tracking terrorism and extremism, I never thought I'd see anything
like this from a U.S. president."

�Axios (@axios) September 30, 2020

The president on Friday claimed he doesn't know who the Proud Boys are, but
the damage was already done. The group got a massive boost on social media
and was trending topic on Twitter for most of Friday.

As remarkable as it was to see a sitting US president dodge an opportunity
to decry white supremacists while elevating a far-right extremist group,
what happened on Tuesday was not an isolated incident for Trump.

For years, white supremacists have looked at Trump's racist, xenophobic
rhetoric as a source of encouragement. And some of the most prominent far
right groups have openly embraced and endorsed the president.

Trump has not made a particularly strong effort to disavow their support,
and his behavior has often aligned with their toxic worldviews. Earlier
this month at a rally in Minnesota, for example, Trump told a crowd of
nearly all white supporters that they have "good genes," echoing the views
of neo-Nazis that white people are genetically superior.

In 2016, the Ku Klux Klan's official newspaper endorsed Trump for
president. The Trump campaign denounced the endorsement, even as Trump
continued to spread disinformation on immigrants and refugees in an effort
to dehumanize and villify them.

Shortly after Trump won the election in 2016, white nationalists gathered
for a conference in Washington to celebrate Trump's victory with Nazi
salutes. Richard Spencer, a well-known neo-Nazi, in a speech opening up the
conference said: "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!"

Trump quickly disavowed Spencer, but his behavior did not change. The
president put barring people from Muslim countries from the US at the top
of his agenda after being inaugurated, despite slim evidence it would
benefit US national security in a palpable way.

In one of the most infamous moments of his presidency, Trump in August 2017
blamed "many sides" for deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. The
president said there were "very fine people" on "both sides." Trump and his
allies have since claimed that Democrats and the media have embellished his
remarks after the white nationalist rally, but what he said is on video and
can also be found on the White House website (which transcribes his public
remarks).

�ABC News (@ABC) August 15, 2017

White nationalist groups were also encouraged by Trump's response to
Charlottesville and the false equivalence he presented between violent neo-
Nazis and counterprotesters. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke at the
time celebrated Trump's remarks via Twitter, thanking the president for
condemning the "leftist terrorists."

After the backlash to his initial remarks, Trump issued a more forceful
condemnation of white nationalist groups. But it was too little too late.

Amid ongoing protests over racism and police brutality following the death
of George Floyd, Trump has relied heavily on white supremacist ploys in an
effort to boost his reelection campaign. The president has lauded
supporters who've headed into Portland to confront and antagonize anti-
racism protesters, which has already had deadly consequences. Meanwhile,
he's decried those protesting racism as "terrorists" and praised violent
crackdowns by law enforcement.