Trump's Army: How the President and Neo-Nazis Work Hand in Hand.

• Author: Ryan, Melissa
• Position: Essay

President Donald Trump had one job.

On the morning of Saturday, August 12, Americans woke up to images of neo-Nazis wielding flaming tiki torches on the march in Charlottesville, Virginia. As the morning progressed, the news got even worse. A car plowed into a group of antiracist counter-protesters, killing activist Heather Heyer and injuring others. As the public attempted to digest the unsettling news, the White House remained silent.

It was nearly two hours after the attack when President Trump spoke from his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

In times of national tragedy modern U.S. Presidents generally follow the same familiar script. They appear on TV to give a brief statement, reassuring Americans that we are resilient and there's nothing we can't overcome. They outline who the bad guys are, as well as the heroes, and promise us that the heroes will triumph in the end because we are America. Most importantly, they bring the country together, reminding us that we're stronger when we're united.

So Trump had one job, and a relatively easy one at that: to unite the country against the literal neo-Nazis who were terrorizing Charlottesville. Instead, much to the astonishment of Americans across the political spectrum, he did the opposite.

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence," he proclaimed. "On many sides, on many sides."

"On many sides." Much of the national conversation in the days that followed centered on the fact that Trump couldn't manage to condemn the murderous white supremacists. But this wasn't merely, as some speculated, to score political points by bashing the left. And it certainly wasn't a misguided attempt at unity spreading the blame evenly around.

It was that Trump couldn't risk alienating this mob.

And they heard him loud and clear. "He didn't attack us," gloated Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, after the remarks. "He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him."

Whether you call them neo-Nazis, the alt-right, or white nationalists, Trump--an overt racist who refers to black-majority nations as "shithole countries"--simply knows them as a key constituency and a significant portion of his political base. After they intruded on my own life, just a month before the 2016 election, I began studying their interactions online. In the months since, I've started calling them by another name, one that best describes their relationship to our sitting President: Trump's Army.

Four years ago, the blog TechCrunch, which covers startups and Silicon Valley, ran a curious piece, "Geeks for Monarchy" by writer Klint Finley. The article may have sounded like it was about some fantasy role-playing game. It actually reported on a tech-related political movement: the Dark Enlightenment, a.k.a. neoreactionism.

"Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy has actually done more harm than good," the article explained. "They propose a return to old-fashioned gender roles, social order, and monarchy."

The article lists prominent neoreactionaries in Silicon Valley, names that have surfaced again in Trump's Army, including former Business Insider Chief Technology Officer Pax Dickinson and PayPal founder and Trump booster Peter Thiel. (Curtis Yarvin, credited with founding the movement, regularly corresponded with rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos during the latter's Breitbart tenure.)

The TechCrunch piece didn't use the term "alt-right," but it essentially described the same movement. As Finley points out, neoreactionaries are pro-monarchy, tied to a belief that intelligence is largely dependent on genetics. "It's not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks," Finley reflected. "It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world."

The alt-right coalition that helped...