Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally at the Fort Worth Convention Center on February 26, 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas. Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images.
A surprisingly soft-spoken version of Donald Trump took center stage early this week, as the GOP presidential candidate delivered a speech on immigration in Mexico. But his unusually loud and bigoted persona re-emerged last night during an address at a rally in Phoenix.
“This will be a little bit different,” Trump told the crowd. “This won’t be a rally speech, per se.”
And he was right. This time around, The Donald managed to squeeze in a few nods to his white nationalist supporters without anyone really noticing.
The Republican presidential nominee covertly laid out his plan to maintain white dominance and ethnocentrism in the United States by amending the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. According to History.com, the pivotal act overturned a previous quota system based on national origin and replaced it with a policy that focused on the reunification of immigrant families and drawing skilled labor to the U.S.
“We’ve admitted 59 million immigrants to the United States between 1965 and 2015,” Trump said. “Many of these arrivals have greatly enriched our country. So true. But we now have an obligation to them and to their children to CONTROL future immigration as we are following, if you think, previous immigration waves.”
He went on to state that: “To keep immigration levels measured by population share within historical norms. To select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society and their ability to be financially self-sufficient. We take anybody. Come on in, anybody. Just come on in. Not anymore.”
Under the 1920’s Emergency Quota Act, the outlandish immigration control policy proposed by Trump was actually the norm. The Huffington Post reports that the controversial act was used to put a cap on the number of people of certain nationalities who could immigrate to the U.S. However, the doors were still open to immigrants who were of white, European descent. This way the government could ensure that America remained predominately white and European.
It wasn’t until the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act that America saw an influx of Asian, Latin American and African immigrants.
So, in amending the pivotal 1965 act, Trump’s goal is seemingly to keep America from becoming less white than it already is. This idea is nothing new, as notorious white nationalists like David Duke have been promoting it for years, the Huffington Post reports.
“I’m overjoyed to see Donald Trump … embrace most of the issues that I’ve championed,” Duke said in a YouTube video announcing his run for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
According to Atlanta Black Star, the former Klansman has long been an avid supporter of Trump, referring to him as the “white knight” of “European interests.” The GOP candidate has since been criticized for his refusal to denounce the endorsement from Duke.
Conservative website The Daily Stormer even joined in on the Eurocentric fun, asserting that if Trump is elected he’ll need a white nationalist like Duke to “push things further right than he is.”
“When David Duke is saying ‘we need to completely repeal the 1965 immigration act and issue an executive order stating that all citizenship awarded to non-Whites after 1965 was fraud and need to be stripped from those awarded it,’ all of the sudden, Trump banning and expelling Moslems becomes normal,” the site states.
The overwhelming amount of support for Trump by white nationalists comes as no surprise to researchers from the George Washington University Program on Extremism.
In a new study titled, “Nazis v. ISIS on Twitter: A Comparative Study of White Nationalist and ISIS Online Social Media Networks,” researchers found that Trump-related hashtags dominated the white nationalist and Nazi social media spheres. For instance, explicit hashtags backing the GOP candidate like #Trump2016 and #MakeAmericaGreatAgain came in as the second and third most used hashtags among the white nationalist data set. Hashtag #WhiteGenocide topped the list at number one, according to the study.
“New developments and new propaganda items are a constant part of the ISIS landscape, whereas content in white nationalist networks tends to be repetitive, with few meaningful changes to the movement’s message, landscape, or political prospects,” research author J.M. Berger wrote in the analysis. “A notable exception to this is Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, which has energized white nationalists and provided new talking points and opportunities for engagement. Trump’s candidacy is likely driving some portion of movement’s recent gains on Twitter.”
