The Klan and others now knew they had a friend in the White House, who similarly wanted to turn the clock back to a neo-antebellum period when women were second-class citizens, Blacks weren’t full citizens at all, and the Bill of Rights applied only to a certain class of people. Americans sometimes forget that the notorious Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black voters in the post-Civil War era were named for James R. Crowe, a founding member of the KKK back in 1865.

