Instead Of Condemning White Supremacist Militias, Donald Trump Marshals Them and Asks Them to Stand By, As They Will Probably Be Needed In Case He Loses Elections
By Nicholas Kristof
Sept. 30,
2020
President
Trump didn’t hurt Joe Biden in Tuesday’s debate, but he badly damaged our
country.
Trump
harmed the United States in three ways, reminding us that the biggest threat to
America comes not from desperate migrants, not from “socialists” seeking
universal health care and not from “anarchists” in the streets — but from the
White House itself.
Illustration
by The New York Times.
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The first
way in which Trump damaged the country was in his salute to violent extremists.
“Are you
willing tonight to condemn white supremacists?” Chris Wallace, the Fox News
anchor who moderated the debate, asked Trump. Trump initially dodged the
question but finally asked petulantly, “Who do you want me to condemn?”
Biden
suggested the Proud Boys, a militant group that is fervently pro-Trump.
“Proud
Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump declared.
Stand by?
The Proud
Boys, founded in 2016, are part of what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls
“a fascistic right-wing political bloc.” The Anti-Defamation League compares it
to a gang. The Proud Boys’ founder once said, “I cannot recommend violence
enough,” and its members have brandished guns, committed criminal assaults and
engaged in rioting. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have banned Proud
Boys.
While the
Proud Boys deny that they are white nationalists and the founder is suing the
Southern Poverty Law Center for its descriptions of them, the group’s members
identify as “Western chauvinist” and assert that “white men are not the
problem.” They have longstanding links to racism, and a Proud Boy (since expelled)
apparently was the organizer of the 2017 Charlottesville rally that drew
neo-Nazis. An anti-Semitic podcast once estimated that if Proud Boys were
pressed, “90 percent of them would tell you something along the lines of
‘Hitler was right. Gas the Jews.’”
The Proud
Boys responded enthusiastically to Trump’s comments at Tuesday’s debate,
celebrating them as “historic” and boasting that they were already bringing in
new members.
“That’s my
president,” declared the Proud Boys’ leader, Enrique Tarrio, adding, “Standing
by, sir.” Some added “stand by” to the group’s logo.
After
addressing the Proud Boys on Tuesday night, Trump added: “Somebody’s got to do
something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem …
this is a left-wing problem.”
Look,
violence is a right-wing problem and a left-wing problem. A careful study by
the Center for Strategic & International Studies concluded that “right-wing
extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States
in 2019.”
Original Headline: Trump Calls on Extremists to ‘Stand By’
Source: The New York Times