President Trump stunned the nation, members of his own party, the press, and, apparently, his staff on Tuesday with his candid remarks regarding last weekend's deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The day before, he had reluctantly condemned the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who comprised much of the rally, but just 24 hours later, standing in the lobby of Trump Tower, the president was back to to condemning groups "on both sides" of the fighting.
"You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent," Trump told reporters during an impromptu press conference. "Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch."
The comment elicited immediate outrage, with some noting the "false equivalency" of comparing white supremacists and neo-Nazis to the people who endeavor to stop them.
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It was but the latest round in a seemingly endless tug-of-war between the president and the press over how to treat the so-called alt-right white nationalist movement. During the last two years, as Trump rose from underdog candidate to president, the media has fixated on outing this small subculture, while the president has routinely embraced it. In doing so, journalists (and, to be fair, Trump) elevated this fringe group with far more exposure than it initially deserved. Now, it's not so small—and what's more, it's turned deadly. The press and the president alike must face this hard truth.
The question of how to cover the alt-right and its leaders has long been a complicated one. It's grown even more so given that President Trump appointed leaders of that movement—including White House adviser Steve Bannon, who previously ran the alt-right media company Breitbart—to his staff. At its core, the mainstream press is grappling with this conundrum: Ignore these groups and risk allowing a potential public threat to go unreported; shine too bright a light on them and risk amplifying their message—or worse, attracting new acolytes to the cause.
There’s no right approach to covering this growing movement, but one thing is certain: The press has erred on the side of overexposure. It’s positioned the alt-right in the center of President Trump's story, in part because of the shock value of the movement’s actions. This fringe group has taken the country’s implicit history of racism and made it explicit, which is certainly newsworthy. But that's brought unpleasant side effects, namely, giving the leaders of these hate groups coverage disproportionate to their influence. After all, it took a whole lot of mainstream Republicans to help usher Trump into office. Trump received the greatest number of primary votes in the history of the Republican party. He also won the general election with 88 percent of Republican party votes, according to exit polls. The right got Trump elected; the alt-right was merely a subset.
But as Trump's comments on Tuesday indicate, he clearly believes it is a crucial subset. “No matter how the vote breaks down, the president won on a platform and with a campaign that reflects and resonates with the priorities of the alt-right broadly and white nationalism specifically," says J.M. Berger, an author and analyst who studies extremism. "There's not really room for a debate about cutting off the flow of oxygen to the movement through more measured media coverage.”
The alt-right surge arguably started during the presidential campaign, when these groups exploited the media's fascination with violence. Videos of Trump supporters punching protesters at campaign rallies flooded social media. So too did videos of their caustic rants against the press. At times, Trump encouraged this behavior, knowing there were cameras watching. “Trump knows the media’s there because of the threat of violence," says Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works and a professor of philosophy at Yale University. "It gives amplification to the groups. Then the groups use violence even more.”
The press ceded more ground to the white nationalist movement, Stanley argues, by pushing the phrase “alt-right” into mainstream lexicon. The term, which avowed white nationalist Richard Spencer claims to have coined, essentially serves as a euphemism for white supremacy, Stanley says, and allows Spencer and his ilk to feed the narrative of alt-rightness and white supremacy as two distinct things, thus allowing racist ideology to fester and metastasize under a more palatable moniker. Distinguishing between the alt-right and its more hateful subsets, in other words, plays into hate groups’ hands.
“When you relabel national socialism and white supremacy ‘alt-right,’ you’re giving up something extremely substantial,” Stanley says. “This is semantic warfare.”
Not everyone agrees with that. Berger, for one, wrote in a blog post that distinguishing between the alt-right and neo-Nazism is critical to understanding how the movement operates. The alt-right isn't synonymous with neo-Nazism, he argues, but is instead an umbrella on top of those extremist groups. “Rejecting the alt-right label might make you feel better, but it unproductively obscures the primary element that makes it work as a movement—its ability to unite disparate radical groups with differing beliefs and tactics into a single amorphous community that is capable of coordinated action,” he writes.
Whatever you call it, it’s clear that public awareness about these topics has increased dramatically since Trump announced his candidacy. The size and scope of the white nationalist movement remains hard to measure, but Google Trends reveals dramatic increases in searches within the United States for terms like “white nationalism,” “alt-right,” and “kkk,” as well as searches for the leaders of these groups, including David Duke and Spencer.
Those spikes in interest, of course, come as much from people seeking to condemn white supremacy as they do from people who may hold those views. Still, as ISIS’s recruitment efforts have shown, something as simple as a Google search can sometimes be the top of the funnel toward radicalization. This surging interest in white supremacy also parallels an uptick in media coverage. Prior to 2015, Google News turned up few results on Spencer or the alt-right. These days, both the man and the movement are infamous.
It’s little surprise, then, that white supremacist groups feel emboldened by their newfound fame. Some who rallied in Charlottesville have celebrated Saturday’s deadly clash as a success. In one harrowing interview with VICE, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell notes that the next protest will be “tough to top.”
“I think a lot more people are going to die before we’re done here, frankly,” Cantwell says, weapons strewn over his hotel bed.
If and when these hate groups do come out from behind their computers and take to the streets, you can be sure the press won't be far behind. They were there on Sunday afternoon as Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the weekend’s Unite the Right rally, stood in front of city hall ready to the make a statement about Saturday’s violent chaos. Look at any photo or video of the moment—seconds before Kessler took a punch to the face and fled the scene—and you’ll see a coiffed Kessler dressed sharply in a dark suit surrounded by a clutch of cameras and journalists elbowing one another out of the way to hear what he had to say. Just a day after Kessler’s rally led to the death of one woman and the injuring of 19 other people, the press didn't give him a microphone to express his poisonous ideology. It gave him dozens of them.
