“Hail Trump!” Richard Spencer bellowed. “Hail our people! Hail victory!”

It was November 2016, not long after Donald Trump’s surprising presidential victory, and Spencer, perhaps America’s most well-known figure in the so-called alt-right, was speaking to a packed room of white nationalists in Washington, D.C. A clip of the speech, first published by The Atlantic, went viral and seemed to confirm the worst fears of many Trump critics: that the president-elect had empowered a fringe movement of racist, right-wing radicals and launched it into the mainstream.

But less than 18 months later, on March 5, 2018, Spencer spoke in front of another room of like-minded supporters, this time at Michigan State University. Only now, the audience was smaller than the one in D.C., and Spencer seemed far less triumphant. “We are going to have to suffer through these birth pangs of becoming a real movement,” Spencer said, referring to the scattered crowd. Outside, a smattering of self-identified neo-Nazis rumbled with a much larger group of left-leaning protesters.