Starting Friday, September 14, a convention of pro-Trump racists, white nationalists, and European neo-Nazis oozes into St. Louis at the Airport Marriott, featuring everyone from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and racist Ohio Congressman Steve King to YouTube figure Steve Molyneux (who argues that blacks are genetically inferior) and two fascist, white nationalist European lawmakers (one Polish, one German). Sponsored by the right-wing Eagle Forum, brainchild of the late Phyliss Schlafly, the convention is peddling “white pride,” anti-minority racism, and the bedrock principle of the pro-Trump movement: that white Christians are the only real Americans.
White nationalism is nothing new in America. What is new is that their views now have a wider reach thanks to President Trump. We all knew exactly what Trump was the moment he declared he was running. He had a history of racism going back decades. He was endorsed by David Duke and the American Nazi Party. Everyone should have known exactly what he was, and 63 million Americans voted for him anyway.
Among those, according to CNN exit polls, were eight percent of African-American voters. That means, roughly, that 1,296,000 black voters cast ballots for a man who was endorsed by actual honest-to-God Nazis, and who told a white Iowa crowd at an August 2016 rally that African Americans should vote for him because, in his words, “What have you got to lose?”
More than a million did. Why? In some cases it was pretty clear. For Omarosa and actress/right-wing mouthpiece Stacey Dash, it was political opportunism, trying to wring an extra paycheck or two from the novelty of being a black white nationalist. For Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, better known as Diamond and Silk, it was to make a quick buck off of Trump supporters who bought their swag.
So I decided to ask a normal person, a friend of mine, a middle-aged black businesswoman from St. Louis with two advanced degrees. I knew she had voted for Trump, but we hadn’t spoken about it.
She agreed to answer two questions: why did you vote for Trump, and how do you feel about that decision now? There was a lot to unpack in her answers, because much of the information she based her vote on is false.
She told me, “I voted for Trump because I did not want the murderous criminalistic Clintons back in the White House. Also the fact that Hillary was running around here talking about how black lives mattered, but banished Bill’s black son, Danney Williams. Anybody but Hillary. You get three strikes, they send you to prison. She’s had way more than three!”
Let’s take that answer apart.
“The murderous, criminalistic Clintons.” For about two decades, the right wing has circulated stories that anywhere from 20 to 50 people associated with the Clintons were murdered on Bill and Hillary’s orders because they had some sort of “incriminating evidence.” This nonsense got rolling in 1994, right after Newt Gingrich’s gang of radical Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives.
Former California GOP Congressman William Dannemeyer, a rabid crusader against gay rights, sent Congress a list of 24 people with some connection to the Clintons, all of whom had died. He called for as congressional investigation. He was ignored. Since then no evidence of any kind has established any link to the Clintons being in any way connected to the deaths.
And Dannemeyer? In 2001, he was arrested for (wait for it) soliciting for sex in a public men’s bathroom. He now runs a website claiming Jews are taking over the world. The snopes.com internet rumor-debunking website summed up the whole thing: “We shouldn’t have to tell anyone not to believe this claptrap, but we will anyway.”
“Hillary…banished Bill’s black son, Danney Williams.” Danney Williams, a bi-racial man from Arkansas, has claimed that Bill Clinton is his father. That rumor flew around the internet and faded, before being resuscitated during the 2016 election by Russian-sponsored Facebook ads, and by right-wing sites like NewsMax. One big problem: a 1999 paternity test paid for by the Star supermarket tabloid proved that Clinton was not the father. Even right-wing rumor-monger Matt Drudge concluded in 1999 that the rumor was “a cruel hoax perpetrated by the boy’s mother,” Bobbie Ann Williams, a former prostitute.
So my friend’s reasons for voting for Trump all turn out to be lies and internet hoaxes, lies and hoaxes that she believes.
And what about her feelings now?
“I’m very unhappy I voted for Trump because he’s a habitual liar,” she said. “The taxes are worse than they have ever been. He is running things like a dictator. He seems to have a loss of memory on his decision-making. The old fart needs to be impeached!”
It took a while, but the truth finally caught up with the internet lies. The problem, though, is that a lie you want to believe is better than the truth and is more easily believed by gullible people. Donald Trump’s cynical knowledge of this explains much of his success.
It’s the classic tool of the con man. Since the days of frontier snake oil salesmen, on through the age of P.T. Barnum, and now with the American Mussolini, con men have always known that, on some level, their suckers want to be conned. They want to believe.
In my friend’s case, she wanted to believe that Hillary Clinton was a murderer, that Bill had a spurned black child, and that Trump would be an antidote. Those were all lies.
And the truth? The truth is that America itself is in danger, in danger because people believed nonsense and ignored the ugly truth about Trump that was right in front of their eyes.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
