Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

by Eli Saslow

“I’m not convinced he’s one of us—not by a long shot—but he’s smart enough to know that a lot of white people in this country are fed up and angry. They are looking for someone who will express that for them. If Trump wants to win, this kind of strategy might get him elected. It depends what else he has to say.” What Trump said during those next months was that he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He said he was the “law and order candidate” in the age of Black Lives Matter. He said he was qualified to be president in large part because of his “beautiful, terrific genes—a wonderful inheritance.” He said his primary goal was to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, who Trump continued to insinuate was a foreign-born Muslim. He said America’s inner cities were overrun by “gangs and thugs,” and “right now, if you walk down the street, you get shot”—and then to prove that point he re-tweeted a crime statistic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks. A few days later, after criminologists told Trump that his number was wildly off base—that in fact it was only 14 percent—Trump said, “What? Am I gonna check every statistic?”