Trump Branding Complete: CPAC Welcomes Nazis

Donald Trump has been a keynote speaker at CPAC since 2017, and increasingly since then it has modeled itself in his image. That transformation seems almost complete as during 2024 CPAC, Nazis were welcomed.

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“Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.

Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories,” Ben Goggin reported for NBC News.

They were “spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies.”

Indeed, CPAC is confirming years of criticism of Trump and the Republican Party as a racist and neo-Nazi enabling.

In previous years, the Nazis who tried to attend to spread the message of white nationalism that Trump has openly embraced were asked to leave. But those days are over.

Trump has remade CPAC into an openly racist, white nationalist Nazi event in keeping with how he conducted himself as president and continues to behave now.

Not only were there not a lot of Black people at Trump’s speech at the Black Conservative Forum, causing Jason Easley to ask, “There are black conservatives in the country, so where are they?”, but also…

It was suggested that Black voters would like Trump because he was hawking sneakers. Trump was overtly racist in his speech, saying Black voters like him because of his indictments, which suggests that Trump believes Black voters relate to an indicted criminal.

Trump also said he knows Black people because they worked for him, sounding very much like a Plantation owner saying his slaves are family.

It was Donald Trump who in 1989 led a death penalty charge against five black and Latino boys who were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman in New York City. In 2002, another man admitted the rape.

After one of Trump’s arraignments, one of the Central Park Five took out an ad reading: “Now, after several decades and an unfortunate and disastrous presidency, we all know exactly who Donald J Trump is – A man who seeks to deny justice in fairness for others while claiming only innocence for himself,” he wrote.

In 2018, a man inspired by right wing rhetoric that echoed Trump’s fear-mongering about a caravan shot and killed 11 people in the Tree of Life Synagogue. He shouted anti-Semitic hate as he did so.

After this mass shooting, Trump, who was then President, repeated a completely unfounded and anti-Semitic conspiracy that the caravan was funded by George Soros, saying “A lot of people say yes” when asked by reporters if Soros was funding the caravan.

In 2017, then President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville saying they included “some very fine people.” After a car driven by a white nationalist plowed into a group of anti-racism protesters, Trump blamed in part the “alt-left,” saying, “there’s blame on both sides.”

This, of course, blames anti-racism protesters for objecting to racism, as if this act deserves violence in return.

Trump used to walk these kinds of comments back, saying both the racist, anti-Semitic thing and then also later condemning it, which would earn him points for condemning language and conspiracies that he would return to.

No matter how Trump publicly walked back comments, the white nationalists saw him as their own, and as someone who was mainstreaming their beliefs.1

But now in 2024 as the embattled former president faces 91 felony indictments and has been found liable for both sexual assault and fraud, it appears as though the days of equivocating endorsement of white supremacist neo Nazis are over.

In case anyone has any doubts left, Trump’s Project 2025 is readying to infuse the U.S. with anti-democratic Christian nationalism.

Nazis mingling openly with MAGA attendees at CPAC is yet another indication of where Trump plans to take this country should he win office again.

1. Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

Image: Dan Scavino, Jr social media

Sarah Jones

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