Donald Trump is planning to spend the penultimate night of his campaign rallying with Ted Nugent, a musician and NRA board member who has a long record of violent rhetoric, misogyny and anti-Semitism.
Nugent will reportedly join Trump at a Michigan rally tonight, part of a final whirlwind of campaigning.
It is a fitting way for Trump to close out a campaign that has been driven by racial resentment and elevated some of the most extreme voices of the Right.
Trump, who has been complaining about "lewd" language in Jay-Z's songs after Jay-Z and Beyonce campaigned with Hillary Clinton on Friday, apparently has no problem with Nugent's history. In fact, Nugent himself has said that "Donald Trump is as close to Ted Nugent as you’re going to get in politics.”
Earlier this year, Nugent posted an anti-Semitic meme to his Facebook page claiming that an assortment of Jewish public figures--all identified by Israeli flags on their pictures--were the ones "really behind gun control." He followed it with a meme claiming that the U.S. is on "the same path" as Nazi Germany. He commented that Holocaust victims were "soulless sheep to the slaughter" but "not me." Facing criticism, Nugent angrily wrote on Facebook, "What sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for guncontrol [sic] are nazis [sic] in disguise?"
In a 2007 concert, Nugent fantasized about violence against "piece of shit" President Obama, "worthless bitch" Clinton and "worthless whore" Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
I was in Chicago and I said hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these you punk; Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun,” Nugent screamed during a concert while brandishing two machine guns, “Then I was in New York and I said, ‘Hey Hillary you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch…. Then I was out in California and I thought, Barbara Boxer, she might want to suck on my machine gun, hey Dianne Feinstein ride one of these you worthless whore.”
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Stumping for Mitt Romney at an NRA convention in 2012, Nugent predicted that he would "either be dead or in jail by this time next year" if Obama were to be reelected.
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At the same event, Nugent compared Obama and Clinton to coyotes who need to be shot.
Just this year, Nugent declared that Obama and Clinton "should be tried for treason & hung," calling Obama the "enemy of America." Last year, he claimed that veterans commit suicide because "the commander-in-chief is the enemy.”
Also this year, he posted on Facebook a video fantasizing about Hillary Clinton being shot, commenting, "I got your guncontrol right here bitch!" He's called the Democratic presidential candidate a "bitch" several other times as well.
Nugent has suggested shooting immigrants crossing (or, as he put it, "invading") the southern border. He's called Obama a "subhuman mongrel." He blamed the Sandy Hook school shooting on "an embarrassing, politically correct culture that exalts and rejoices in the bizarre; aggressively promotes an 'anything goes' value system; and vilifies, condemns and mocks traditional societal values and customs at every opportunity." Commenting on a Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, he wrote, "I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War.”
And that's just the lowlights. What more fitting way could there be for Trump to end his campaign.
