The spot was released a few hours before a planned Hillary Clinton speech tying Donald Trump to the "alt-right," a nebulous term usually used to describe a group of online pro-Trump trolls who have often used racist or anti-Semitic images to show their support. The alt-right is actually a bit more complicated than that, but the racist wheel gets the media attention, as the old saying goes.
Recognizing that most people have no idea what the alt-right is, Clinton's ad instead focuses on a much more immediately offensive group: the Klan. There's no Ku Klux Klan endorsement process (though there used to be) so Clinton relies a bit of guilt-by-association, looping in comments from a famous former Klansman (David Duke) and an anonymous current one, interviewed while in full robe and hood.
The alt-right link is nebulous in a different way. While Trump's new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, once boasted that his Breitbart News site was "the platform for the alt-right," Bannon denies that he's embracing the racist side of the movement. He told Mother Jones's Sarah Posner that he saw the site as nationalist — but not a nationalism focused on racial identity. As he put it to Posner: "Look, are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe. Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are attracted? Maybe. Right? Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes, right? But that's just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard left that attract certain elements."
All of this, though, is meant to continue to put pressure on a weakness for Trump: the perception that he himself is bigoted or racist. The Post reported this week on his campaign's efforts to push back against that notion. It's a perception so strong that a fifth of Republican men and a quarter of Republican women said in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that they thought Trump harbored some bias against women or minorities. More than 50 percent of voters overall felt that he did, including nearly three-quarters of nonwhites.
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