When Kamala Harris quickly took the lead in most national and swing state polls in early August and consolidated her advance deep into September, Donald Trump tried to move toward the center to win over potentially decisive moderate voters. On the far right, some saw this as betrayal.
Christian nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes lambasted Trump for going weak-kneed on issues like abortion and the 2020 election results. Fuentes, recalling his past glee over MAGA, questioned whether it still made sense to vote for Trump.
In the latter half of the summer, Fuentes was hardly the only prominent far-right influencer or media voice dissatisfied with Trump’s presidential campaign.
On Aug. 7, Internet personality and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted about “weak” Trump surrogates speaking on his behalf and calling for him to tap into “better talent in his arsenal.” She hinted at infighting, saying, “A lot of people are wondering why so many people with talent are being sidelined.” She said that the situation “needs to change FAST because we can’t talk about a stolen election for another 4 years.”
It is, she added, “Time for some offense.”
The next day, Fuentes — whom Trump helped make famous when the self-described neo-Nazi and the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) dined with him at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 — escalated his warnings in a post on X (formerly Twitter), where he has 423,000 followers. The Trump campaign, he wrote, had been “hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, & donors that he defeated in 2016, and they’re blowing it.” In a post that has been viewed 2.7 million times, Fuentes warned, “Without serious changes, we are headed for a catastrophic loss.”
Right-wing influencer Candace Owens, who has 5.7 million followers on X, put out a podcast episode a week later entitled “MAGA Civil War!? What’s going on with the Trump Campaign.”
The main gripe of all three — and many others — was that Trump wasn’t attacking hard enough on immigration.
A former Trump administration official, who spoke to Capital & Main on condition of anonymity, put it this way: “Immigration is a key issue that he made his bones on in 2015” when he launched his victorious presidential campaign. Far beyond the influencers, a lot of people “want him to go hard on it. They see so much ground [he] can plow. It drives them crazy.”
In the Aug. 13 broadcast available to Owens’ nearly 2.8 million followers, she showed a clip of Fuentes’ show in which he went further with his criticism. “You have alienated us. You have ignored us. You don’t listen to our concerns. We have been left behind. The Trump movement and the GOP have moved on without us.”
Fuentes, who is vociferously anti-Israel and often shares blatantly anti-Semitic messages, claimed that the movement instead “serves Israel and corporations and immigrants. … What about Americans? What about young white men — and others too? What about us?”
He declared a social media “war” in which he would call on his mostly youthful supporters to prevent the Trump campaign from trying to coddle political moderates, and instead drag the presidential candidate further to the right.
After encouraging his followers to withhold their votes, Fuentes told the Washington Post that if Trump loses this election, people might come for the young right-wing radical. But, Fuentes said, “He’ll have lost because he stopped talking to the MAGA base he had in 2016.”
Amid the flurry of criticism, Trump’s campaign took a notable turn in September, especially on immigration and race.
During the debate with Harris on Sept. 10, the former president brought up false claims about Haitian immigrants eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio. These claims grew out of a communications effort by Blood Tribe, a small neo-Nazi group that marched around Springfield with assault rifles and swastika flags a month earlier. Despite a complete lack of evidence to back Trump’s rumor-spreading, he subsequently doubled down on his assertions, as did his running mate, JD Vance.
On The Hugh Hewitt Show on Oct. 7, Trump falsely claimed that the Biden-Harris administration has allowed 13,000 foreign murderers into the country who are “now happily living in the United States.”
At rallies in Minnesota and Colorado, Trump told his largely white crowd that they had “good genes,” while adding, in language long used by white supremacists, that immigrants pouring across the southern border have “bad genes.” (The former president even told Hewitt’s listeners that he believes that murder is “in their genes.”)
Trump told rally attendees in Aurora, Colorado, that immigrants from Latin America, the Middle East and Congo are “the most violent people on Earth.”
He also accused Harris of importing “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World … to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Within weeks of Trump’s intensified attacks on immigrants, some key hard-right supporters who had been wavering returned to the fold, according to Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a human rights group that tracks hate groups.
More surprising, perhaps, Trump began to narrow Harris’ lead in the polls, which are now deadlocked, though it is unclear whether Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric has contributed to his polling rebound.
The increase in immigrant bashing and race-baiting from the former president has played well on social media, particularly on Elon Musk’s X, which has largely eliminated restraints on hate speech and welcomed back Christian nationalists like Fuentes, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, former Ku Klux Klan leaders like David Duke and neo-Nazis who had been banned. (Musk, meanwhile, has in recent months become a major Trump election booster and financial supporter.)
Some far-right figures, like Fuentes and Duke, have recently made clear that they will not vote for Trump. Fuentes said in an Oct. 7 video that he was “seceding from MAGA,” saying he no longer believes Trump will come through on his big promises other than those he makes to Israel.
But Michael Cohen, the ex-president’s former fixer turned critic, told Capital & Main that the many far-right figures who are once again supporting Trump never really had anywhere else to go.
“He is their Commander in Hate,” Cohen said. They may have lost their passion for a time because Trump was not being “divisive and vitriolic enough. But ultimately, they have no choice but to come back” to him.
That’s because Trump’s opponent “is a black woman who believes in the Constitution, women’s reproductive decision-making rights and equality for all — attributes they abhor.”
Roxane Auer contributed research to this article.
Copyright 2024 Capital & Main.
