Confident is good, scared is better

When Donald Trump said, “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn’t lose any votes,” the scariest thing about it was not his audacity but his accurate reading of his base. Every day there is a new revelation of Trump’s chicanery, bigotry, etc., but none of it seems to make a dent among his “Alt-Right” followers. After a boisterous Trump rally, a TV reporter pointed out to one of the attendees that most of what Trump said was untrue. She thought a moment then replied, “Yes, but he’ll get things done.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

One of the best and scariest publications I’ve ever come across is the magazine “Intelligence Report,” issued twice a year by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It details the activities of hundreds of Nazi and white supremacist groups across the country, hardly any of which gets into the mainstream press. Its summer issue featured an article titled “Hate in the Race,” about such groups rallying around Trump — sought or not.

Trump famously denied knowing anything about David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, when informed that Duke was supporting him. Trump belatedly disowned Duke’s support, but Duke hasn’t withdrawn his support for Trump. The “Intelligence Report” article notes that Duke praised Trump’s immigration plan, and he said that Trump “has really said some incredibly great things recently.”

The article also cites a group called the White Genocide Project, “which promotes the myth that white people worldwide are being subjected to mass murder.” It states that members of this group have started a petition to honor Trump for “opposing white genocide.”

Another white-supremacist group, the American Freedom Party, has gone one better. Its leader, William Daniel Johnson, founded a political action committee, originally named the American National Trump Super PAC then renamed the American National Super PAC. It started rolling out robocalls for trump, and was joined in those calls by a racist named Jared Taylor, who said, “We don't need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture.”

Yes, confident is good — which is the essence of Hillary Clinton’s campaign speeches — but there is good reason to be scared enough by the gutter rats who have swarmed around Donald Trump to make sure that he never sets foot in the Oval Office.