http://www.wsj.com/articles/white-nationalists-see-advancement-through-donald-trumps-candidacy-1463523858White Nationalists See Advancement Through Donald Trump’s CandidacyPresumptive Republican nominee’s campaign has disavowed support of supremacist groups
By BETH REINHARD
Updated May 17, 2016 6:29 p.m. ET
White nationalists are hailing Donald Trump’s elevation to presumptive Republican presidential nominee, while also trying to boost their own political profiles and activity.
Although Mr. Trump has spurned these extreme groups’ support, the level of interest within them for the White House candidate rivals that for segregationist George Wallace, who won five states in the 1968 election, and for conservative Republican Pat Buchanan, who denounced multiculturalism in the 1990s.
Mr. Trump is being heralded by these groups for his proposals to bar Muslim immigrants, deport millions of people living illegally in the U.S., and build a wall along the southern border.
“White men in America and across the planet are partying like it’s 1999 following Trump’s decisive victory over the evil enemies of our race,” wrote Holocaust denier Andrew Anglin, who calls Mr. Trump “the Glorious Leader” on his Daily Stormer website, after the candidate all but sewed up the GOP nomination on May 3.
While his policy prescriptions proved popular with GOP primary voters, Mr. Trump is now the presumptive nominee of a party that has struggled in recent presidential elections to expand its appeal beyond white voters. At the same time, his hard-line immigration policy and high profile are big lures for extreme groups seeking to elevate their status and views.
Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Mr. Trump “has disavowed and will continue to disavow the support of any such groups associated with a message of hate.”
The businessman isn’t the only candidate who has attracted white supremacists.
Ku Klux Klan leader Will Quigg of California, who last year backed Mr. Trump on Twitter, told the Telegraph newspaper in March that he wants Democrat Hillary Clinton to win. The Clinton campaign rejected that support.
Last year, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz brushed off donations to his presidential campaign from Earl Holt III, leader of a white supremacist group that authorities allege was cited as an inspiration by Dylann Roof, the man charged with killing nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015. The campaign said it refunded $2,300 to Mr. Holt and sent $2,700 as a donation to a fund set up for the families of the church-shooting victims.
It also isn’t the first time the KKK tried to align with a nominee in the modern era. Klan leaders in 1984 tried to throw their support publicly to President Ronald Reagan, who rebuffed their overtures.
Mr. Trump earlier this year drew criticism for his hesitation to disavow the support of David Duke, a former KKK leader and former state representative from Louisiana. But earlier this month, after Mr. Duke described Mr. Trump’s success as overcoming “these Jewish supremacists who control our country,” Mr. Trump said, “Anti-Semitism has no place in our society, which needs to be united not divided.”
He also returned a $250 contribution in February from white nationalist leader William Johnson, whom the campaign listed among its California GOP convention delegates before striking him from the list last week.
Mr. Trump’s rejections have failed to deter support from leaders of what civil-rights groups label “right-wing hate groups.”
These groups’ websites, radio shows and podcasts are filled with praise for Mr. Trump’s views on immigration, appeals to vote for him and calls to volunteer for his campaign. Some white nationalist leaders have boasted online about attending his rallies, either as supporters or as journalists, and say the traffic on their websites is increasing since the rise of Mr. Trump.
“Trump’s candidacy has absolutely electrified the radical right,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights organization that tracks extremist groups.
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People who identify as white nationalists, white-rights advocates or race realists say that even if Mr. Trump’s views don’t exactly line up with their own, they appreciate his willingness to speak his mind, regardless of the backlash.
“The main reason white nationalists support Donald Trump is that he is the real deal,” said Mr. Johnson, the rejected California delegate. “I speak from the heart and so does he.”
Attendance at this coming weekend’s annual conference hosted by American Renaissance, which publishes a website on topics including eugenics and alleged IQ differences between races, is expected to double to 300 people, said editor Jared Taylor, in part because of Mr. Trump’s success.
“Donald Trump says what millions of Americans have thought for years—and is much too popular to be silenced,” reads a notice about the event near Nashville, Tenn., that is described as a “celebration of our world brotherhood of Europeans.’’
Mr. Taylor did a robocall earlier this year before the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire in which he said: “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.” The call was funded by an outside group and not approved by the Trump campaign.
Exit polls show large majorities of Republican primary and caucus voters agree with Mr. Trump’s plan to ban Muslim immigrants, at least temporarily. Mr. Trump has said the ban is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks because the process of screening immigrants is inadequate.
“It’s very encouraging when someone of the prominence of the Republican presumptive nominee says some of the same things we’ve been saying for years,” Mr. Taylor said. “Who needs Muslims? Who needs Mexicans? Once you ask those questions, you think, ‘Who needs Haitians?’ Mr. Trump is reacting in an almost visceral way to the idea of whites becoming a minority.”
Mr. Trump’s allies say he can’t control who backs him, and he is wary of drawing more attention to their rhetoric, said the Rev. Darrell Scott, a black pastor in Cleveland and the chief executive of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, a multiracial, multiethnic group of supporters.
“I don’t think he wants to make an issue of white supremacists,” Mr. Scott said. “Any radical element of society that says they like Trump gets the opportunity for media coverage, and he doesn’t want to magnify that.”
Civil-rights groups say Mr. Trump, despite his disavowals, has sent signals to people who hold racist views. His posture toward immigrants also has been repudiated by many leaders in his own party.
“White supremacists and white nationalists have been marginalized in our political discourse, but Trump’s campaign is bringing them out of the woodwork and making it easier for them say certain things,” said Peter Montgomery, senior fellow at the People for the American Way, a liberal group.
In his campaign announcement speech in June 2015, Mr. Trump said some Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug dealers. He said he would consider shutting down mosques to prevent terrorist attacks, and he backed a “deportation force” such as the one used by the Eisenhower administration to round up illegal Mexican immigrants and send them back across the border.
With millions of followers on Twitter, Mr. Trump has retweeted encouragement from white supremacists, as well as faulty crime statistics that suggest the vast majority of murders of white people are committed by blacks. Earlier this month, he told NBC News that Germany is “crime-riddled” because of Muslim immigrants. Mr. Trump didn’t offer evidence to back up these claims. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the vast majority of murders of white people are committed by other white people. German newspapers have reported that government statistics show the increase in migrants hasn’t been accompanied by a proportionate increase in crime.
In February, the Anti-Defamation League sent a list of 11 “racist individuals and extremists groups” to all of the Democrats and Republicans running for president, urging them to steer clear. All of those on the list had expressed support for Mr. Trump.
“We’ve seen him use blistering attacks against his opponents but we haven’t seen him use the same level of force and clarity against these racists and anti-Semites,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s national director. “As the GOP nominee he absolutely needs to do more.”
