How Is Donald Trump Any Better Than Nick Fuentes?
“He’s gonna be the GOP nominee in our lifetimes, isn’t he,” one wag tweeted over the weekend, in reference to Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi, is all over the news right now, having been profiled in recent months by a bevy of mainstream media outlets, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and of course, interviewed by Tucker Carlson.
As reports emerge that “between 30 and 40 percent” of young Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are fans of Fuentes, there is much wringing of hands on the more mainstream sections of the American right, with the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and The Free Press’s Coleman Hughes launching broadsides against Fuentes and trying to inoculate the US conservative moment from his ‘Groyper’ pals.
But here’s my question: how is Nick Fuentes worse than.. Donald J. Trump?
After all, the president of the United States has been a proud and open racist for decades now. He was paying for a racist and violent ad in the New York Times nine years before Fuentes was born. He was being investigated for racism against Black renters by the Nixon Justice Department 25 years before Fuentes was born.
In recent days, Trump has turned up the dial on his racist and bigoted demagoguery. In a two-minute rant at the end of a North Korea-style two-hour cabinet meeting last Tuesday, the president lambasted the 250,000 Somalis living in the United States, the vast majority of whom are US citizens. “We don’t want ‘em in our country,” he said not once but five times, telling Somali-Americans “to go back to where they came from.” He called Somalis in the US “garbage” four times in just seven seconds, as AP noted.
The president then doubled down on his anti-Somali bigotry in an Oval Office exchange with reporters the next day, saying Somalia is “not even a nation, just a people walking around killing each other.” He called for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a US citizen and congresswoman, to be “thrown the hell out of our country.” He accused Somali-Americans, as a whole, of having “destroyed Minnesota” and “destroyed our country.”
Even by Trumpian standards, which include praise for neo-Nazis as “very fine people” and a dismissal of “shithole” countries in Africa, these were astonishingly brazen outbursts of vicious, unadulterated, old-school racism. Calling an entire people “garbage”? Telling American citizens, born and raised in the US, to “go back to where they came from”? If that isn’t racism, then I don’t know what it is.
It is also so, so dangerous. “I think it is also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric – and this level of dehumanizing – can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president,” Rep. Omar, who is a Somali-American, told CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday. Back in 2016, on the eve of the presidential election, a group of Trump-supporting domestic terrorists who called themselves ‘The Crusaders’ were indicted – and later convicted – for planning a series of car bomb attacks on the Somali community of Garden City, Kansas. Who do you think they took their anti-immigrant, anti-Somali cues from?
We can only wonder – and worry about – what will happen now. When it comes to racism and white supremacy, Trump is in fact worse than Fuentes – who he hosted for a Thanksgiving dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022, lest we forget – because the president is backed by the power of the state. Trump doesn’t just say horrifically racist things, as Fuentes does on his online show; he does horrifically racist things.
Take Trump’s new policy on entry into National Parks. According to Axios, “free entry to National Parks will now be granted on President Trump’s birthday but not on Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Juneteenth.”
Take Trump’s policy on refugees: his administration is planning for “almost all people admitted to the US as refugees – as many as 7,000 from a maximum potential pool of 7,500” to be white Afrikaners from South Africa, per the Washington Post.
Take Trump’s policy on legal immigration, in the wake of his administration’s decision to pause all applications from citizens of 19 supposedly “high-risk” countries. At a naturalization ceremony in Boston last week, “officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.”
Meanwhile, and bizarrely, Fuentes himself seems to be now trying to stake out a more moderate position, denouncing the “performative cruelty” of Trump and MAGA and their reliance on “mean-spiritedness to appeal to the basest instincts of its followers.”
Don’t be fooled: deep down, Nick Fuentes is as cruel and mean-spirited as the MAGA folks. But here’s the (insane) double standard. If Fuentes called Jews or Black people “garbage” and told them to “go back to where they came from,” Republican politicians and the top pundits on the center-right would happily denounce him as an extremist, a racist, and a white supremacist.
But when the GOP’s Dear Leader says the same about Somalis?
Crickets.
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I understand the sentiment, that Trump is worse now because he's president and Fuentes is not. But I think if Fuentes were to be elected (2036 at the earliest because he was born in 1998), he would do all the Maga wet-dream stuff that Trump is hesitant to do. At the end of the day, all Trump wants is to be loved and worshipped. That's why he was so warm to Zohran Mamdani. Fuentes, on the other hand, is a legit psycho.
Like Trump 1.0, Trump 2.0 is another round of trying to find the "soft spots" in the American bureaucracy in trying to solidify a conservative theocracy. They've been successful in putting in loyalists in charge of agencies and at many levels of the federal apparatus. But yet these individuals are still not willing to go the extra step - they're still not willing to go to full fascism. I think the next "Maga - 3.0" will make that next step, whether in 2033, 2037 or 2041. No doubt there's still tremendous harm being committed RIGHT NOW. But I think many right-wing figureheads thought that we'd legitimately be Nazi Germany by now, and some are crashing out (and fighting eachother!) because their whole project seems to have already hit its high point.
While it may not be exactly Fuentes who's a Republican nominee in the future, putting him in there as a sort of conceptual placeholder is still useful to keep in mind. The Maga era doesn't go away when Trump passes on. Even with a relatively successful 8 or 12 years of Dem rule, they'll be ready when their next opportunity arises.