White nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke on Thursday said that his supporters see vast promise in Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
“The Trump campaign on a whole series of levels is a great opportunity for us to expose the people who really run the Republican Party, who run the Democratic Party, who run the political establishment and who are leading us all to disaster,” he said on his radio broadcast, as first reported by Right Wing Watch.
{mosads}“Even though Trump is not explicitly talking about European Americans, he’s implicitly talking about the importance of European Americans,” added Duke, a former grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan.
“I truly believe that we’ve got to keep Trump’s feet to the fire. I think we have to make sure that Trump understands that we expect him to follow through on these things and we expect him to be, you know, our white knight, our advocate, our person.”
Duke said that Trump’s campaign has upended the political establishment, earning the ire of those who fear their power is fragile.
“The Trump candidacy has truly been a referendum on nationalism,” he said. “It has been a referendum on the controlled establishment, both the media and the political establishment in America.
“So far Trump has whipped them. He has had the enmity, the hatred, the attacks of the true enemies of not only the republic, but the European American people, the traditions and values of this country.”
Duke said establishment Republicans are trying to self-destruct the GOP to prevent Trump from becoming its standard-bearer.
“It’s important to know that the neo-conservatives are into a scorched-earth policy right now,” he said. They are absolutely trying to destroy the Republican Party.
“I think that like so often happens, Jewish chutzpah knows no bounds. These Jewish extremists have made a terribly crazy miscalculation because all they’re really going to be doing by doing the ‘never Trump’ movement is exposing their alien, anti-American majority position to all the Republicans.”
The New York Times on Thursday reported that Duke was deriding donors involved in the Stop Trump movement, including Paul Singer, a Jewish billionaire interested in Israel’s national security.
Trump on Thursday said that he “totally disavows” the racial undertones of Duke’s criticism, adding that they are not welcome in national discourse.
“Anti-Semitism has no place in our society, which needs to be united, not divided,” he said in a statement, according to The New York Times.