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In the coming days and weeks, Trump will undoubtedly take pains to clean up the mess he left on Saturday. He will get on script and echo the sentiment belatedly tweeted by his daughter, Ivanka, on Sunday: There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis. He may even symbolically purge his administration of some of its leading white supremacists: Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, Kris Kobach. And a lot of people will be fooled. Some will continue to maintain, as Samantha Bloom did on Saturday, that Trumps not a supremacist.

But Trumps foot soldiers will know better. When he veered from his prepared remarks on Saturday, he spoke his real truth. It is no coincidence, as NBCs Benjy Sarlin observed, that Trump tends to interpret any request to condemn hate as a personal attack. Of course he does: It is personal for Trump, just as surely as it is for Spencer or Duke or Bannon. The president is the most powerful hate-monger in America. He is the imperial wizard of the new white supremacy. He is GEOTUS to his followers on 4chan and Daily Stormer: God Emperor of the United States. Its hard to conceive of an acronym that would please this president more.

Before this weekend, the chief form of terror practiced by Trumps white nationalists was online. As Angela Nagle writes in her indispensable book about the alt-right, Kill All Normies:

Multiple journalists and citizens have described in horrifying detail the attacks and threats against those who criticize Trump or figures of the online Trumpian right, especially if the critic is female, black or Jewish, but also if theyre a cuckservative. They now have the ability to send thousands of the most obsessed, unhinged and angry people on the Internet after someone if they dare to speak against the president or his prominent alt-light and alt-right fans.

Trump has long endorsed that form of terror, too, with equally unmistakable signalingnamely, retweeting some of the worst. Hes also sent clear wavelengths not only through his anti-Hispanic hate speech, but with (among other things) his failure to denounce David Duke after his campaign endorsement; his drumbeat of degradation of women like bleeding Megyn Kelly; and, more tangibly, his reorienting the federal governments counter-domestic-terrorism efforts to focus only on Islamic extremism, not white supremacists.

Trump does not merely play footsie with the new white-supremacist movement in America, as Jennifer Rubin wrote in an otherwise blistering condemnation of his moral idiocy at The Washington Post on Sunday. He embodies the movementin his rhetoric, in his actions, and in his person. Just as white people created America and made it great, in the view of the white nationalists, Trump built his business empire all on his own, with no help from his real-estate mogul father. And just like the neo-Naziswho spent Sunday spreading Alex Joness message that Charlottesville was a George Soros conspiracyTrump is always blameless. And if you challenge his paranoid version of truth, he will not engage with you, he will not try to persuade youany more than Spencer or Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin will. He will mock you, and intimidate you. Rhetorical violence is his stock-in-trade.

Perhaps most important, Trumps vision of the world is identical to the apocalyptic fantasies of white genocide peddled by his followers. What, after all, is white supremacy in America in 2017? It is, first and foremost, an expression of delusional self-regard and white male entitlement run riot. It is the insistence that some peoplewhite American malesare inherently better than others, and deserve preferential treatment. To his supporters, and to himself, Donald Trump is the living embodiment of Hitlers concept of Aryan Herrenvolk (Aryan Master Race). He is our first neo-Nazi president. And until we acknowledge that unthinkable truth, and treat Trumps presidency as the anti-democratic crisis that it is, he will not be the last.

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Donald Trump, Neo-Nazi Recruiter-in-Chief - New Republic