It’s becoming far too common to be coincidental, but once again the Trump campaign has been linked to associations with white power groups as the delegate-selection process chose one particularly distinguished white nationalist to re/present Donald Trump at the Republican convention.
William Johnson, one of the country’s most prominent white nationalists, told Mother Jones that he felt honored to have been selected and felt that the choice made his hateful views more “mainstream.”
“I just hope to show how I can be mainstream and have these views. I can be a white nationalist and be a strong supporter of Donald Trump and be a good example to everybody.”
Johnson’s roots in the white power movement go back decades, having been a strong proponent for a nation-wide removal of all minority groups including people with any ‘ascertainable trace of Negro blood.’
Johnson was also the fellow who funded the white-power robocalls for the Trump campaign earlier in the election cycle. Despite Trump’s hesitant support of his group, his devotion to Trump is unshakable because it is teaching the rest of the nation that his views are maybe not as extreme as they once were considered:
“For many, many years, when I would say these things, other white people would call me names: ‘Oh, you’re a hatemonger, you’re a Nazi, you’re like Hitler.’ Now they come in and say, ‘Oh, you’re like Donald Trump.'”
After this story initially broke on Tuesday afternoon, the Trump campaign quickly sprang into action, saying that their selection of Johnson was the result of a “database error” and that they were unaware of his status as a member of a white power organization. All this despite the fact that there is clear proof of a correspondence between the campaign and their race-hating delegate far before the story broke.
Johnson has now agreed to step down from his position, though no doubt he still feels that Trump is on his side.
Considering that Trump has been widely endorsed by white power groups across the nation and that Trump caused quite a stir by pretending he wasn’t familiar with both David Duke and the KKK (and refusing to disavow their support for a couple of terse newsdays), we just don’t buy that the campaign wasn’t in the know about their white-power buddy.
Trump wants the support of white power, minority-hating groups and people like Johnson. And it’s not just their support they want, but their input as well. They want these divisive, hateful, and dangerous groups front and center in a Trump administration to teach the hateful demagogue everything he needs to know about how to suppress and murder minority groups. Trump may pretend to be “kumbaya,” but he wants to create the same sort of America that Johnson dreams of: White and Christian from sea to shining sea.
