“He’s not Hitler,” Melania Trump said earlier this month in defense of her husband.
It’s a disclaimer not typically offered about the presidential nominee of a modern political party. But white nationalists and neo-Nazis have embraced Donald Trump — sending robocalls on his behalf, calling him their “Glorious Leader” on hate websites, and sending threatening messages to Jewish journalists covering him — and the presumptive Republican standard-bearer has repeatedly declined opportunities to denounce them.
Trump stalled before disavowing the endorsement of David Duke, a former KKK leader, and missed a deadline to take white nationalist honcho William Johnson off his delegate list. “I don’t have a message to the fans,” Trump said when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked if he had anything to say to his supporters who sent Holocaust-themed memes and offered overnight casket delivery and homicide cleanup services to Julia Ioffe, a HuffPost Highline contributor who wrote a GQ profile of Melania.
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