"He is a hostage of the Jews": Trump angers his alt-right fans with Holocaust Remembrance statement

Trump has finally issued a Holocaust statement that isn't anti-Semitic — and his far right supporters aren't happy

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published April 24, 2017 6:27PM (EDT)

 (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton/Getty/Nicholas Kamm/Photo montage by Salon)
(Reuters/Shannon Stapleton/Getty/Nicholas Kamm/Photo montage by Salon)

President Donald Trump's recent statement for Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day did not succumb to the anti-Semitic tendencies of the White House's previous major statement on that subject — and some of the president's biggest supporters on the far right are not happy about it.

"You remember when he gave the Holocaust Day message that didn’t include the Jews?" wrote Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, on Monday. "You remember when it then came out that Jews tried to include Jews in the Holocaust Day message and the White House blocked it and said they didn’t want Jews to be mentioned?"

Anglin asked his neo-Nazi readers, "Do you remember when Donald Trump lobbied to take 'anti-Semitic Neo-Nazis' off the extremist list? Do you remember when Trump sent the FBI to arrest the ADL’s Jew prank call hoaxer?"

But now, Anglin argued, "our President is being held hostage by vicious Jews."

On Sunday, the president said in a speech to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in New York that the Holocaust is "the darkest chapter of human history.”

"Six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide," Trump said. "We pledge," he continued, "Never again."

The reaction to Trump's explicit condemnation of the Holocaust from his so-called alt-right supporters is part of a larger trend which has emerged over the past month, as Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner (who is Jewish) has supplanted chief strategist Steve Bannon (who ran the anti-Semitic Breitbart website) within the president's sphere of influence. Not surprisingly, the alt-right and neo-Nazi fringes have sided with Bannon and against Kushner.

Similarly, former KKK grand wizard David Duke recently wrote on his website that "we need to call out the Jewish nature of this coup d’état, and destroy the Jewish privilege of being above any criticism once and for all."

On another occasion, Duke claimed that "Trump might not even know half the things they [his Jewish advisers] do."

He also added, "If we totally abandon Trump, say he has to get impeached, who are we going to get in turn? Mike Pence? He’s the biggest cuck in the world."

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By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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