Trump Is Still Promoting The Views Of White Supremacists

(The image above is from YouTube.)

There is a reason why the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy groups have enthusiastically joined the movement to elect Donald Trump as our next president -- he's a racist who doesn't mind carrying water for those groups.

His latest embrace of white supremacy is an attack on Germany's Angela Merkel, in which he parrots the feelings of the racist groups. Here is how Alice Ollstein describes it at Think Progress:

In a major foreign policy speech on Monday, which offered few details and many inaccuracies, GOP nominee Donald Trump attacked his Democratic opponent’s stance on immigration and refugees by comparing her to the chancellor of Germany. “Hillary Clinton wants to be America’s Angela Merkel,” he said.

He fired off two press releases that same day calling Clinton “America’s Merkel,” and took to Twitter to warn of the dangers of #AmericasMerkel.

The line of attack “baffled” political analysts, who wondered why Trump would possibly think referencing a largely-unknown European leader Merkel would help him win votes in the United States. A Pew Study last year found that “Germany is not on the radar of many Americans,” with more than a third reporting “no opinion” of Merkel at all.

But there is at least one group of Americans well familiar with Merkel, her immigration policies, and her connections to Hillary Clinton: white supremacists.

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” “Anti-White Traitor,” and “patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked in articles about her, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

In fact, Trump’s new line about Clinton wanting to become “America’s Merkel” can be found almost verbatim in these white supremacist forums. “If Hillary takes power she will be to America what Merkel is to Germany,” a member of Stormfront wrote in March. “Hillary Clinton is America’s Angela Merkel,” wrote a commenter on American Renaissance in April.

Heidi Beirich, who investigates and tracks white nationalist groups for Southern Poverty Law Center, told ThinkProgress that Trump “seems to be parroting the hate sites” and speaking to their concerns.

“There is no question that the people who call him their ‘glorious leader’ know exactly what he’s talking about,” she said. “That is the audience that is concerned about this issue. Merkel is hated by Trump’s white supremacist supporters, and she and Clinton are seen in the same light.”

Less than a year ago, Trump had nothing but effusive praise for Merkel, calling her “fantastic” and “probably the greatest leader in the world today.” Weeks later, after Merkel announced that her country would accepthundreds of thousands of refugees, Trump changed his mind, slamming her for “ruining Germany” and calling her a “catastrophic leader.” This week, he claimed that “crime has risen to levels that no one thought would they would ever see” thanks to Merkel’s refugee policy. But official data shows no increase in crime over the last year, and the number of crimes committed by migrants has declined by more than 18 percent between January and March of this year.