The “alt-right” movement complained Wednesday about their hero Donald Trump after he pointedly disavowed them.
White nationalist Richard Spencer said he was “disappointed” with Trump.
But Spencer said that he’s going to “wait and see” when it comes to the president-elect, adding that he gets “where he’s coming from politically and practically.”
A post on Reddit’s r/altright board, one of the movement’s bases, linked to Trump’s disavowal and asked: “Anyone here feeling bamboozled by the Donald?” Dozens of people responded.
“You are fooled if you think Trump was going to give us some sort of permission slip to start cleansing America. He isn’t our ‘man on a white horse,’” said one commentator.
Trump’s top strategist, Steve Bannon, has called the website he used to run, Breitbart, a “platform for the alt-right.”
But Trump denounced the white nationalists Tuesday.
“I don’t want to energize the group. I’m not looking to energize them. I don’t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group,” Trump said in a sitdown with the New York Times, adding that his goal was “to bring the country together.”
Trump was pressed about the movement after Spencer’s National Policy Institute held a conference in Washington, DC, on Saturday in which he shouted “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” as hundreds of his supporters responded with Nazi salutes.
The institute, which calls itself “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world,” was gung-ho about Trump until his comments on Tuesday.
Spencer has called for “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”
At the conference, he referred to the media as “Lügenpresse,” a term he said he was borrowing from “the original German” that means “lying press” and which the Nazis used to attack critics.
“America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Spencer said. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
Spencer said at the conference that the alt-right had a “psychic connection” with Trump.
The alt-right, he added, had been a “head without a body” and that at the beginning of the election campaign, Trump was “kind of a body without a head.”
According to a manifesto published in March on Breitbart: “The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.”
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