(Photo of Trump via Agence France-Presse)
A sociology expert testified in court on Tuesday that former President Donald Trump, over the years, has very carefully calibrated his pitch to appeal to far-right extremists while maintaining plausible deniability among more moderate voters.
While testifying at a trial in Colorado that will determine whether Trump should be barred from running for president under the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution for inciting an insurrection, Dr. Peter Simi, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Chapman University, played clips of Trump's opening speech announcing his presidential candidacy back in 2015 — in which he accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists and drug dealers before adding a caveat, "And some, I assume, are good people."
"Here we get back to plausible deniability," Simi said, arguing Trump was employing a deliberate strategy. "This negation, after using inflammatory language. For far-right extremists, they hear the rapist part, they understand the negation is necessary."
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He then went on to document how Trump pulled this trick multiple times, such as when he said there were some "very fine people" marching at the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, while also saying that he wasn't talking about any Nazis who happened to be there.
He noted that white supremacist leaders ranging from Richard Spencer to David Duke to The Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin all expressed gratitude for Trump's "very fine people" comment, even though Trump threw in a carve-out that he was not praising Nazis.
All of this culminated, said Simi, on January 6th, 2021, when violent extremists such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers saw Trump's promise of a "wild" protest against the 2020 election as a call for a violent takeover of the United States Capitol building.
Simi then showed a video of Alex Jones reacting to Trump's tweet in December 2021 that Jones predicted would be "the most important call to action since Paul Revere's ride" during the American Revolutionary War.
