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LAST UPDATE | 1 hr ago
IT WAS THE picture, taken on what should have been a day of American unity and celebration, that semaphored around the world, landing on the front pages of national newspapers and dominating social media. It will almost certainly appear in America’s history books, if the unvarnished story of this era is ever written.
It’s a picture that delivers a punch to the gut before the brain processes what the eyes have seen; a devastating verdict on the truth and consequences Trump’s return to power.
The image of Bernita Bowlding, a 33-year-old Black mother of two children, on a Washington Metro train, apprehensive yet unflinching, surrounded by dozens of masked Patriot Front members, marks a continuum of a centuries long history of oppression and menace.
We’ve seen plenty of chilling images documenting the rising tide of white supremacism in America over the past decade. From the August 2017 neo-Nazi march at Charlottesville, Virginia, with their tiki torches and chants of “Jews will not replace us”, to the white nationalist insurrectionists laying waste to the Capitol on January 6th.
But there’s a chilling symmetry of sorts to this white supremacist resurgence. On 4 July 1926, the Ku Klux Klan marked America’s 150th Birthday with a march on Washington, their identities concealed by pointy white hoods and full-length robes.
One hundred years later, their Patriot Front doppelgängers prefer dark polo shirts and chinos, baseball caps and sunglasses. Their heads, necks and faces are covered with what retired Air Force Colonel Moe Davis, the Pentagon’s former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, witheringly refers to as ‘face diapers’. New outfits, same old shit.
Their march on the same DC streets as their KKK forebears is calculated to induce the same feelings of dread amongst minorities – and outrage amongst the majority of white Americans who want no part of this.
They celebrate their ability to swarm DC’s transit systems and public places unchallenged as a white power flex. Their prejudices may be blinding, but their spines are not so strong that they’re willing to risk their social and economic security to openly proclaim them.
There is no law in the US against belonging to any of the 300-plus extremist hate groups that have proliferated in the US over the past decade or so. The Biden administration established a government-wide framework to monitor and disrupt extremist groups, often by funding anti-recruitment initiatives by former neo-Nazis.
Trump, whose father Fred Trump was arrested during a 1927 Klan riot in New York, ended FBI and DHS programmes to prevent the spread of extremism.
Trump’s enabling and emboldening of white supremacists was in evidence long before he arrived in the White House in 2017 on foot of an anti-immigrant platform underpinned by racist dog whistles. A few months later, Unite the Right staged a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of their members drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring another 37.
Trump’s condemnation, when it finally came, was undermined by his assertion that ‘there were very fine people on both sides.’ But Virginia’s state and federal prosecutions clamped down hard; two dozen neo-Nazis received lengthy sentences for their involvement in organised violence. The Unite The Right leaders were ordered to pay $24 million (€21.05 million) in damages in a subsequent civil trial, which was reduced to $4 million (€3.51 million) by an appeals court.
The swiftness and severity of the clampdown prompted the far right to reconsider their tactics. Large-scale publicised events were abandoned in favour of unannounced ‘flash’ marches and gatherings which prevented counter-protesters from showing up in force.
During the 2020 Presidential debate, asked if he was willing to explicitly condemn white supremacist and militia groups, Trump responded: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.”
The message resonated loud and clear. Less than four months later, the Proud Boys led the January 6th storming of the Capitol. Their leader, Enrique Torres and his three deputies received sentences of between 15 and 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. Dozens of others received sentences for felony destruction of property and assault.
The day of his second inauguration, Trump commuted the leaders’ sentences and granted the members full pardons along with more than 1500 others. His plan to divvy up $1.8 billion (€1.58 billion) amongst his insurrectionist mob members has been derailed, but his administration is becoming ever bolder in its determination to reconfigure America as a white Christian nation.
The Republican response to Patriot Front is to launch a two-pronged attack on its critics. The first, as summed up by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, is to insist its July 4th march was a hoax, an attempt by Democrats/Antifa/the FBI/ communists to besmirch the reputations of Christian nationalists and true patriots.
According to Ingraham and dozens of others – including Republican Senators – the 400-plus Patriotic Front members who chose to celebrate America’s 250th Birthday by marching around DC, chanting ‘reclaim America’ whilst hiding behind masks, sunglasses and baseball caps emblazoned with fascist symbols are impersonators of the chaps who normally do this sort of thing. An Antifa tribute band to the far right, if you will.
The other White House-directed line of defence was given its cable news trial run by Doug Burgum. Trump’s Secretary of the Interior is an apposite choice, given that original appointees to this Cabinet position were charged with the forced relocation of Native Americans to make way for white Christian colonists who believed they had a superior claim to their lands.
Burgum, one of Trump’s most craven acolytes refused to condemn the Patriotic Front, chose to hide behind the flimsy – and highly selective – fig leaf of free speech. “.. there are plenty of things that I see that I might personally find offensive, [reprehensible]. But in America, free speech is allowed,” he said, going on to fret about the communists who are really destroying America.
Small wonder that America’s white supremacists are back marching on the Capitol. Even more than Trump, JD Vance is arguably their greatest enabler, with his attempts to apply a patina of intellectual rigour to their racist thuggery. Vance doesn’t just serve as Trump’s spokesman on this topic, he’s also the messenger boy for his mentor and bankroller, Peter Thiel.
Emboldening and enabling neo-Nazi thugs is only part of the story. Whitewashing American history and erasing the achievements of black and minority leaders and heroes is the other. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone about the latter with an efficiency and determination that is in marked contrast to his bumbling, chaotic oversight of the Pentagon, systemically firing Black and female generals and scrubbing tributes to historic Black and minority excellence from its halls and archives.
Now Trump has turned to rewriting America’s history on a grand scale. Earlier this week, the White House Domestic Policy Council issued a 168-page attack on the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees the 21 museums and nine research institutes that line Washington DC’s National Mall. Between them, they chart 400 years of American history. The entire kaleidoscope of the United States’ evolution is represented, with all of its triumphs and tragedies.
But according to the Trump commissioned report, the Smithsonian Institution – and the National Museum of American History in particular – are home to “a radical, activist cohort dedicated to reframing the American story to serve its ideological ends”. The report claims its directors are motivated by “an intellectual framework rooted in Marxism.”
The report, which was commissioned by JD Vance on foot of a 2025 executive order directing the removal of ‘improper ideology’, conveniently concludes that Trump, as president, “has a duty and obligation to seek reforms of the Smithsonian” and fulfil the museum’s mandate as ‘a beacon of patriotism.’
In other words, a full MAGA purge is on the cards. Several Smithsonian senior staff are singled out as culprits. A year ago, Trump’s hounding of National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet forced her resignation.
The language and the hyperbole are quintessentially Trump, with its conclusion reading like an all caps Truth Social late night post; “As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country,’” it declares.
Enabling white supremacists on DC’s streets is one thing. Replacing American history and culture with an Orwellian overwrite is quite another, with Vance eagerly fulfilling the role of a latter-day Winston Smith in his self-styled Ministry of Truth. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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