Luke Ford

The worse it gets, the better Trump will look to many voters.

America might need a strong man like Trump every so often.

Politico: In his victory speech after last week’s Florida primary, Donald Trump pinpointed the key moment in his meteoric political rise: “Paris happened.”
Trump said that after the November terrorist attacks that left 130 dead in the French capital, soon followed by a terrorist massacre in San Bernardino, California, his campaign “took on a whole new meaning … And all of a sudden the poll numbers just shot up.”
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Now many national security specialists fear that further attacks like the bombings that killed at least 30 people in Brussels on Tuesday will fuel Trump’s further rise, drawing more voters to his clenched-fist approach of closed borders and retribution killings — and could ultimately pave his unlikely path to the White House.
“In a climate of fear, Trump’s semi-authoritarian, unilateralist approach may be more appealing,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about Trump’s strongman political style. “I don’t think so. But I might be wrong. It may be that people are so frightened that they’re willing to endorse policies that nobody over the last 50 years has even raised as remote possibility.”

All of these issues are, in fact, pillars of the aggressive response we have seen by Donald Trump in response to the news today,” said Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. She is the co-author, with University of California Riverside professor Jennifer L. Merolla, of the book Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public.
Warning that more attacks in the U.S. are likely, Trump on Tuesday renewed his calls for a return to the waterboarding of terror suspects — which Congress outlawed last year — and warned that radical Muslims are infiltrating the U.S.
In a cautionary note for Democrats, Merolla said that their research showed that frightened voters do not necessarily look for traditional leadership qualities such as Clinton’s long tenure in government. She added that female politicians “are typically at a disadvantage” when terrorism is a dominant issue.
There was some evidence on Tuesday of pro-Trump sentiment emerging from unlikely quarters. “Hate Donald Trump all you like, but at least he seems to recognise the magnitude of the threat and at least he has firm proposals for how to try to defeat it,” the former CNN prime-time host Piers Morgan, generally considered a liberal, wrote in the Daily Mail. “[H]ow many more scenes like this morning’s appalling images from Brussels are we going to tolerate before we try a non-PC option to beat these disgusting excuses for human beings?”
Some Democrats still have bad memories of the 2004 election, when then-Senator John Kerry failed to unseat a vulnerable incumbent in President George W. Bush thanks in part, former Kerry aides said, to voter fears about terrorism.

Rudy and Trump have been friends for a long time.

REPORT: Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani will probably endorse Donald Trump for president, but wants to “think about it a little bit more” beforehand.

“The way I look at it, there really are only three people who will be the next president of the United States. One’s Hillary Clinton, the other’s Donald Trump, and the third is Ted Cruz,” he said at a Monday night event hosted by the Columbia University College Republicans on campus.

A recording of Giuliani’s remarks was obtained by POLITICO New York.

“So I’ll choose between those three,” he said. “I’ll give you a hint: it won’t be Hillary Clinton. I seriously doubt it will be Ted Cruz. But I just want to think about it a little bit more before I do anything formally.”

Somebody who cares about white people is no more a white supremacist than a Tibetan who cares about Tibetans is a Tibetan supremacist.

Hurling slurs is easy, but it reveals you don’t have an argument. There are only two honorable forms of argument — disputing facts and disputing theory. That’s it.

From Fortune magazine: In late January, Donald Trump did something that would have sunk almost any other presidential campaign: He retweeted an anonymous Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist who goes by the not-so-subtle handle @WhiteGenocideTM. Trump neither explained nor apologized for the retweet and then, three weeks later, he did it again. This subsequent retweet was quickly deleted, but just two days later Trump retweeted a different user named @EustaceFash, whose Twitter header image at the time also included the term “white genocide.”

None of this went unnoticed among ardent racists, many of whom believe there is a coordinated effort to eventually eliminate the “white race.”

Trump is “giving us the old wink-wink,” wrote Andrew Anglin, editor of a white supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, after Trump retweeted two other “white genocide” theorists within a single minute. “Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate…Today in America the air is cold and it tastes like victory.”

It is possible that Trump ― who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweeting ― is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings.

“The retweets are based solely on the content, not the personal views of those individuals as they are not vetted, known or of interest to the candidate or the campaign,” says Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks, who declined to explain how Trump searches through his Twitter feed. Hicks also declined (repeatedly) to answer Fortune‘s question as to whether or not Trump believes that white genocide is a legitimate concern.

Countless numbers of people mention #WhiteGenocide each day on Twitter, but Fortune used social media analytics software from Little Bird to find those who are considered to be the most prominent. In the world of social media marketing, such people are called “influencers.”

“Our technology builds a big network of hundreds or thousands of specialists in a particular field or people who used a particular hashtag, and then analyzes the connections between the people in that network,” explains Little Bird co-founder and chairman Marshall Kirkpatrick. “We then find the person or people in that group that are most followed by others in the same group. It’s kind of like a ‘9-out-of-10 dentists recommend’ model rather than measuring people by the absolute popularity. We view it as earned influence within a specific context.”

The Little Bird software analyzed Twitter content to generate a ranked list of just under 2,000 #WhiteGenocide “influencers” as of February 8. The more impactful, the higher up on the list (which, understandably, ebbs and flows a bit over time).

Since the start of his campaign, Donald Trump has retweeted at least 75 users who follow at least three of the top 50 #WhiteGenocide influencers. Moreover, a majority of these retweeted accounts are themselves followed by more than 100 #WhiteGenocide influencers.

But the relationship isn’t limited to retweets. For example, Trump national campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson (who is black), follows the most influential #WhiteGenocide account, @Genophilia, which is best known for helping to launch a Star Wars boycott after it became known that the new film’s lead character was black. (Below are some recent #WhiteGenocide tweets from @Genophilia.)

Pierson also follows #WhiteGenocide influencer @Trumphat, who has tweeted that he looks forward to seeing people “swing from lampposts” on the #DOTR, which stands for Day of the Rope ― a seminal event in the racist Turner Diaries novels that inspired Timothy McVeigh.

Moreover, Pierson has company within Trump’s campaign:

• The official Twitter account for Trump’s campaign in Nevada follows #WhiteGenocide influencers #3 and #40.
• The official Twitter account for Trump’s campaign in North Carolina previously followed #20, #74 and #77.
• Tana Goertz, a senior Trump advisor and co-chair of his Iowa campaign, follows #74 and #117.
• Nancy Mace, Trump’s South Carolina coalitions director, follows #20 and #35.
• Elizabeth Mae Davidson, a former campaign staffer who later sued Trump’s campaign for alleged sexual discrimination, follows #40.
• Dena Espenscheid, Trump’s Virginia field director, follows #5, #22 and #35.

That last example is notable, because one of those followed accounts refers to itself as AdolfJoeBiden and has a profile image of Joe Biden with Hitler’s mustache and haircut — something that would have been visible to Espenscheid were she to have followed the account while using almost any device.

Bill O'Reilly is one step away from mentioning #WhiteGenocide. He finally gets the purpose of immigration.

—
AdolfJoeBiden™ (@Bidenshairplugs) December 02, 2015

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks declined to discuss the Twitter follows of campaign staff or accounts, saying she doesn’t speak for them. Pierson did not return a request for comment.

Several grassroots organizations campaigning for Trump also follow #WhiteGenocide influencers. The most notable example may be Students for Trump, a national organization whose top two student leaders have met personally with Trump. Its main Twitter account (@TrumpStudents) follows nine of the top 100 #WhiteGenocide influencers, plus users like @WhiteAmericaKKK.

Even the Twitter account for @USAFreedomKids, the young girls whose performance for Trump in Florida became a viral sensation, follows 13 of the top 100 #WhiteGenocide influencers, plus another account that promotes a pro-Hitler documentary called The Greatest Story Never Told.

Fortune also used Little Bird software to analyze the top 50 influencers of the Trump campaign slogan #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, and found that 43 of them each follow at least 100 members of the #WhiteGenocide network.

Trump himself follows just 42 total Twitter accounts, none of which are #WhiteGenocide influencers. But a whopping 67.5% of the #WhiteGenocide influencers do follow @realDonaldTrump (as of March 15), while another 24.1% follow Trump campaign social media director @DanScavino. This compares to just 17.7% that follow @tedcruz, 5.7% that follow @HillaryClinton, 4% that follow @BernieSanders and 2% that follow @JohnKasich.