How Trump's hate speech won back the far right and boosted his poll numbers
The former president’s attempts to shift toward the political center this summer angered extremist supporters. To win them back, Trump renewed his attacks on immigrants. It worked.
By Eric Pape, for Capital & Main
When Kamala Harris quickly took the lead in most national and swing state polls in early August and consolidated her advance deep into September, Donald Trump tried to move toward the center to win over potentially decisive moderate voters. On the far right, some saw this as betrayal.
Christian nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes lambasted Trump for going weak-kneed on issues like abortion and the 2020 election results. Fuentes, recalling his past glee over MAGA, questioned whether it still made sense to vote for Trump.
In the latter half of the summer, Fuentes was hardly the only prominent far-right influencer or media voice dissatisfied with Trump’s presidential campaign.
On Aug. 7, Internet personality and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted about “weak” Trump surrogates speaking on his behalf and calling for him to tap into “better talent in his arsenal.” She hinted at infighting, saying, “A lot of people are wondering why so many people with talent are being sidelined.” She said that the situation “needs to change FAST because we can’t talk about a stolen election for another 4 years.”
It is, she added, “Time for some offense.”
The next day, Fuentes — whom Trump helped make famous when the self-described neo-Nazi and the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) dined with him at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 — escalated his warnings in a post on X (formerly Twitter), where he has 423,000 followers. The Trump campaign, he wrote, had been “hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, & donors that he defeated in 2016, and they’re blowing it.” In a post that has been viewed 2.7 million times, Fuentes warned, “Without serious changes, we are headed for a catastrophic loss.”
Right-wing influencer Candace Owens, who has 5.7 million followers on X, put out a podcast episode a week later entitled “MAGA Civil War!? What’s going on with the Trump Campaign.”
The main gripe of all three — and many others — was that Trump wasn’t attacking hard enough on immigration.