A White Nationalist Attends a Donald Trump Rally

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As I approached the Trump rally’s venue, I came upon a group of young women who were marveling at campaign slogans written on the sides of tractor trailers. One read “Keep Mexican Drugs in Mexico.” It almost seemed like the slogan’s creator had originally intended for the middle word to be omitted. 

As the ladies frolicked about the display, oohing and awing while snapping innumerable photos, one of them turned to me and began to gaze at me as if I were a knight in shining armor who had entered her political fantasy. I smiled, said something quick, and continued on my way. I probably should have exorcised my inner low-energy Jeb Bush and stopped to talk, but I didn’t.

Trump was even later to the rally than I was, and I got a good look at the crowd while I waited for him. The most striking feature was the huge swathes of Trumpenproles, i.e., blue collar whites adorned in dark green camo attire and trucker hats. These are people who have been hit hard by the post industrial economy but unlike blacks and Hispanics are not content to use welfare at high rates. In other words, they want jobs. There were so many of them that if Trump had held his rally in a forest, half of his audience would seem to disappear.

Racially, the crowd was even whiter than the Bernie Sanders rally ^[2] I attended earlier this year, with the only nonwhites seeming to be the wives of white guys. Age-wise, the crowd was older on average than Bernie’s attendees, and many were middle aged. However, there was still a considerable number of millennials. The young men reminded me of the energetic, preppy guys I went to college with. Some of them wore star-spangled costumes of red white and blue, complete with shirt, pants, and bandanna. I could imagine nativist Know Nothings being dressed similarly a century and a half ago. The young women, though few and far between, had beautiful, elegant faces and were more of a medium weight than the thin, dainty Bernie girls. Overall the youth seemed to be a very K selected group.

When Trump appeared on stage the crowd erupted with cheering, the likes of which I have never heard. No applause from a professional sporting event could rival its exuberance, its intensity, and its unanimity. Every person seemed to be cheering with all of his heart and in total unison.

The first thing that strikes you about Trump is that he is from another world. As he strolls out on stage, his smooth stride, folded hands, and slight bows are the body language of powerful CEOs in faraway places. There are still more notable traits. He waves his hand in a quick, emphatic manner. Overall, his movements are crisp and decisive. He seems to be the embodiment of the Trumpism “high energy.” Most people who speak before a crowd meekly shuffle up to the microphone, but he joyously walks up to it, seeming to be in his element.

Regarding his speech, I had heard much of what he said before: making things great again, so amazing that we won’t believe it, etc. I disagreed with some of his statements, such as his pledge to increase military spending and his special mention of black Americans in inner cities even though virtually no black people were present. Of course, white people received no special mention.

The part I liked the best was when he compared so-called refugees from the Middle East to the snake in the Soul singer Al Wilson’s song, “The Snake.” In the song a woman pities a snake which is due to the oncoming winter and takes him in as a pet. The snake bites her, and when she asks him why he betrayed her, he replies “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” This is very radical analogy because Trump is suggesting that so-called refugees will betray the white majority which takes them in because it is in their very nature.

The lyrics reminded me of reversion to the mean which states that although many nonwhite immigrants may be the cream of their race’s crop, their kids tend to revert to their racial mean because of genetic factors, thus offering somewhat of a second generation bite to the whites among whom they live. In any case, it’s funny how a Soul song from 1969, the days of Trump’s youth, served as a sort of Aesop’s fable for him later on in life.

Despite his dog whistling fable, Trump is a civic nationalist and not a White Nationalist. He dislikes so-called Syrian refugees because of their cultural and political differences with the West and not because of their racial or phenotypic differences. He only wants to stop Muslims and illegal immigrants from entering the America, and he has bragged about his wall having a “big beautiful door” to allow many immigrants (most of them nonwhite) through. So far as we know, Trump’s ideal nation is a multi-racial one. As a White Nationalist, I’m a member of a small minority in a vast coalition of various sorts of people who support Trump, all of whom have different priorities. We have all decided that he’s better than Hillary, but for his White Nationalist supporters, Trump represents an improvement over standard fare neo-con Republicans such as Bush or Romney in terms of his policies. What’s more the debates his media storm has created have been a boon to our long term metapolitical/cultural struggle, even if he’s not one of us.

As I merged with a river of camo in an effort to exit the event, a song resembling something from a bygone era hummed in from distant loud speakers. It was the vocal ensemble prelude to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, which sounds nothing like the band’s typical rhythmical music. Like “The Snake,” it debuted in the year 1969, when in many ways America was far greater, and certainly far whiter.