It’s impossible to say, though, whether white nationalists have formed a significant portion of Trump’s support. And while this crowd are largely pro-Trump (“Make America Great Again” hats were in evidence), it’s unclear to what extent Trump is aware of them. Spencer, for one, believes he is.
“There are really concentric circles in our movement,” Spencer said. “There’s a hard core of people who are coming to this conference. There’s a wider layer of people who are following us regularly, listening to our podcast, reading everything. There’s another layer beyond that that are reading tweets that are being influenced by mainstream media reports.” Spencer estimated the “hard core” at thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people — but estimated that this hard core was influencing hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.
“We’re on the winning side for the first time in my experience,” Spencer said. “I’m so used to being an avant-garde bohemian intellectual where I have no connection with politics, politicians are ignorant of our ideas or opposed to them.”
“I think Donald Trump unquestionably is aware of us,” Spencer said. “He’s on Twitter, he’s definitely aware of us.”
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