Over the weekend, activists with the anti-Semitic and racist Alt-Right movement celebrated Donald Trump’s election at a Washington, D.C., summit that included rants against Jews and Hitler salutes.
Many of these same activists, who descended on the capital for the event organized by the white nationalist National Policy Institute, have hailed Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, who had called his website, Breitbart, “the platform for the Alt-Right,” to a senior post in the White House, and cheered Trump’s announcement that he will nominate Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to be attorney general.
Trump didn’t do much to distance himself from Alt-Right activists during the election, and often echoed their paranoid and bigoted views about Jews using money to control the political system; international bankers like George Soros attempting to destroy U.S. sovereignty and replace it with “a world government”; black crime against whites; and immigrants, particularly Muslims and Latinos, destroying America. Trump did eventually renounce the support of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, but only after he was heavily criticized for refusing to do so in a CNN interview.
In May, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Trump if he had a message for his supporters who had hurled anti-Semitic abuse and threats at reporter Julia Ioffe after Ioffe had published a profile of his wife, Melania, in GQ.
Trump said he would not condemn those who made the threats: “I don’t have a message to the fans.”
Trump has not only failed to condemn the Alt-Right—even after this weekend’s event in Washington—but has brought their ideas into the White House.
UPDATE: Trump transition team spokesman Bryan Lanza said in a statement that the president-elect “has continued to denounce racism of any kind.”
Trump transition statement on alt right conference where neo nazis and white nationalists were praising Trump's election pic.twitter.com/XZCxVSS6Jt
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) November 21, 2016
