On a moonlit night 39 years ago outside of San Diego, three sedans sped along back roads to pass on claims of illegal alien sightings to federal border agents. In the lead vehicle was David Duke, the mediagenic grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and attached to his sedan was a white hand-painted sign: “Klan Border Watch.” Trailing Duke were three dozen reporters, photographers and TV cameramen who captured a carefully manufactured scene that resonated with those who feared, then as now, hordes of immigrants illegally crossing into the United States.
.. I don’t think Trump equivocated over Duke by chance. As Duke’s biographer, I find many echoes of Duke in what Trump says and does, and in their similar appeal to disaffected white voters.
.. I find many echoes of Duke in what Trump says and does, and in their similar appeal to disaffected white voters.
.. his Klan past obscured his true obsession—combatting Jews who he believes are bent on using blacks and brown-skinned immigrants to undermine the white race.
.. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that I have gotten in Louisiana,” Duke told his listeners. “He’s getting the same kinds of votes that [Pat] Buchanan got. He’s getting the same votes as George Wallace.”
.. “Although nominally a Republican, Duke did not win by assembling the pieces of a traditional Republican coalition,”
.. When Duke was stopped for speeding while he raced around the state, not once did a state trooper give him a ticket. “Let me tell you something,” his campaign aide later told me, “those troopers were all for David.”
.. But his guiding light is actually the profound conviction that Jews are using their control or ownership of big media outlets (think of the New York Times and the Newhouse family) to force whites to live, study and work with blacks, who he believes are genetically inferior. When all those folks rub elbows, miscegenation inevitably results, he believes. The white gene pool is weakened.
.. It’s about what he calls “the demographic threat to America,” and he’s convinced Jews are behind it. “When he’s taking on the immigration, the open borders,” Duke said on the radio, “he’s really taking on the Jewish establishment and he’s taking on the neocons who control the Republican Party.”
.. “The reason we have this incredible destruction of both Europe and America,” he said on the radio, “is because we have an alien race, an alien people who have taken over our countries, taken over our media, taken over our banking, and only Donald Trump of any Republican has spoken up against Wall Street and the Jewish banks like Goldman Sachs.”
.. created his own faction of the Klan after graduating from Louisiana State University because he saw the Klan as a way to generate news coverage to get out his white-rights message.
.. While he ran for the state Senate, I reported that for years he had celebrated Hitler’s birthday (complete with a cake) and had said repeatedly that the Holocaust was a hoax trumped up by Jews to win sympathy. I reported that he sold Mein Kampf and neo-Nazi books out of his legislative office. I even reported that he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and hadn’t paid all of his taxes.
His supporters didn’t care. They accused me and the Times-Picayune of being part of the liberal political establishment.
.. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.”
Donald Trump has disavowed Duke. But in important ways he still acts and sounds like him.