In the hours after I covered the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, I spoke to several alt-right leaders about Donald Trump’s infamously vague condemnation of the day’s “egregious display of hatred,” which he offered rather than call out the racist instigators, who ranged from members of the Proud Boys to people tied to the Atomwaffen Division to the KKK. Nicholas Fuentes, a young white nationalist personality whose online celebrity has only grown since, told me that he understood Trump’s comments to be a subtle endorsement of its extremist principles. “President Trump’s comments perfectly aligned with our side…they were intentionally ambiguous to go along with Washington’s speech codes, yet still managed to condemn the violent left,” said Fuentes, while James Allsup, another notable white nationalist, voiced his agreement but asked that the president “be more specific” in condemning “the violent left.” (Both Fuentes and Allsup have rejected the white nationalist label.)
A little over three years later, Trump did exactly that while addressing the nation during 2020’s first presidential debate. Not only did he seemingly act as a commanding officer responsible for giving direct orders to a violent right-wing street gang, he also blamed “the left wing” for “almost everything,” dodging moderator Chris Wallace’s request that he condemn “white supremacist and militia groups.” The president asked Wallace to name a specific group, so Biden suggested the Proud Boys. “Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by,” Trump said. After apparently putting the Proud Boys on standby, the president demanded that somebody “do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem.”
Just as white nationalists basked in Trump’s ostensible blessing post–Charlottesville, the Proud Boys are responding enthusiastically to a name-drop from the most powerful man on earth. The group shared a photo online of the Proud Boys logo with “stand back” and “stand by” written around it. The Proud Boys page also shared a video of one of its members howling at the TV in celebration after watching the debate segment, per NBC News. One Proud Boys organizer posted that he was “so happy” after “Trump basically said to go fuck them up.” According to BuzzFeed News, some Proud Boys Telegram channels gained hundreds of new followers.
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By Wednesday afternoon, the president was attempting to backpedal. “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are,” he told reporters. “They have to stand down and let law enforcement do their work.” He did not condemn the group, which founder Gavin McInnes has described as his “gang,” explaining its mission statement by saying: “We will kill you: that’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell.” While McInnes has made plenty of vehemently racist comments over the years, including repeatedly saying the N-word and shouting “Sieg heil!” while throwing up a Nazi salute on air, he appears to be focused on convincing Trump supporters to engage in politically motivated violence. “Fighting solves everything. We need more violence from the Trump people,” he once said. “Trump supporters: choke a motherfucker, choke a bitch, choke a tranny, get your fingers around the windpipe.”
In a redux of the all-too-familiar spin game following Trump’s Charlottesville scandal, his Republican allies are doubling down on cleanup duty. Some are claiming the president did not seriously mean what he literally said, including first son Donald Trump Jr., who appeared on CBS News shortly after the contest to assert that his father was simply telling the group “to stand down,” but is “more than happy to condemn” it, despite not doing so when explicitly asked to. “I think he misspoke in response to Chris Wallace’s comment,” Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, told reporters on Wednesday morning. “I think he misspoke. I think he should correct it. If he doesn’t correct it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.” Chris Christie, a former Trump adviser and governor of New Jersey, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he “heard it differently,” adding, “I didn’t read it that way, George, but listen, if you want to read it that way that’s your prerogative.”