Trump disowned by far-right loyalists for going ‘mainstream’

When Nick Fuentes said he was leading an ‘army’ of his followers into war against Donald Trump it took the Republican’s aides by surprise.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Asheville, North Carolina. Picture: AFP

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

When Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist media personality-cum-pundit, said he was leading an “army” of his followers into war against Donald Trump’s campaign, it took the Republican nominee’s aides somewhat by surprise.

Fuentes, once a devoted supporter of the former president, complained that his team had lost sight of the platform that had first helped to propel Trump to the White House.

“You have alienated us, you have ignored us, you don’t listen to our concerns. We have been left behind,” Fuentes fumed on Twitter/X over the weekend, listing policies he felt Trump had abandoned this time around.

Prominent far-right voices – many of whom had been considered influential Trump surrogates – began adding their names to a growing list of detractors. What started as a snowstorm for Team Trump quickly turned into an avalanche.

Candace Owens, a firebrand conservative podcaster who boasts tens of millions of followers across her online platforms, said the campaign had failed to galvanise supporters as it had in the 2016 election cycle.

“The dragon energy of 2015 feels as though it’s been replaced with consultants who care more for nice headlines than fighting for truth,” wrote Owens, a longtime friend of Trump’s who was once communications director for the hard-right advocacy group Turning Point USA.

As Trump has tried to moderate the Republican position on some of the most controversial issues, he looked in danger of losing his base of conservatives pushing for more hardline positions on cultural identity, populist nationalism and non-interventionist foreign policy.

“We’re starting to see the dynamics of a collapsing campaign with the internal dissension and public fighting among his allies,” Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant, said. “The problem for Trump is not so much that they’re not cheerleading for him any more, it’s that they may be representative of the sentiment that’s out there.”

The Trump campaign has stumbled in recent weeks, grappling with a growing momentum behind Kamala Harris and an invigorated Democratic Party.

In a press conference from his residence in Florida last week, Trump went on a hard-to-follow diatribe featuring bizarre claims about Harris and her running-mate Tim Walz’s rallies.

“Trump has awful advisers, or no advisers,” Tim Pool, the hard-right YouTube influencer, said after Trump made the unfounded claim that Harris’s team had used artificial intelligence to exaggerate the size of their crowds.

Owens and others expressed disappointment that Trump’s advisers had not embraced “Project 2025”, the radical blueprint for a second Trump term written by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

The 900-plus page proposal, its architects and its relationship with the Trump campaign have made for one of the most hotly debated issues of the 2024 race.

Harris’s aides have seized on the report as evidence of an extreme second-term agenda. Project 2025 calls for the removal of 5000 public servants and their replacement with Trump loyalists, the criminalising of pornography and a total ban on the abortion pill. Trump has gone to great lengths to distance himself from the proposal as he pushes a more mainstream position on hot-button issues such as reproductive rights.

“His campaign is distancing from Project 2025 because the media is lying about what exactly it entails with the same tired accusation of ‘far-right’,” wrote Owens, who shares many of the Christian nationalist ideas espoused in the Heritage Foundation report.

Fuentes, 25, who dined with Trump and the rapper Kanye West at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, said: “This is about living up to the America First credo put forth by Trump in 2016 which will ensure victory in 2024.

“We support Trump, but his campaign has been hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists and donors that he defeated in 2016, and they’re blowing it. Without serious changes, we are headed for a catastrophic loss.”

Fuentes, a Nazi sympathiser and racist who was banned from Twitter before his account was reinstated by Elon Musk, said that the presidential campaign was in a “death spiral” and called for Trump’s campaign chiefs to be sacked.

“FireLaCivita” and “FireWiles” he said on X, referring to Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who helped to engineer Trump’s political resurrection after President Joe Biden’s win in 2020.

Kerry Cosgriff, a far-right activist and ally of Fuentes, agreed that Trump, 78, had disavowed the “values” that had initially attracted voters such as him. “He was talking about ending the wars, securing the borders, fixing trade, and on top of that he was a politician who was not beholden to corporate interests and foreign lobbies,” Cosgriff said a video post.

“As a white, middle-class, extremely conservative Christian man who felt entirely disenfranchised I finally felt like I had a voice in Trump. Now I feel forgotten.”

He cited Trump’s “complete flip” on abortion, his threat to bomb Iran, taking a $US100m donation from a pro-Israel lobby group, and his choice of two “Never Trumpers” – and so-called Washington swamp-dwellers – in LaCivita and Wiles.

In a sign of how worried the campaign is, JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, took the time to hit back at Fuentes over the weekend, calling him a “total loser”. He said in an interview with ABC News: “I’m not at all worried about Donald Trump, [but] I’m worried sometimes about these ridiculous attacks.”

The Pittsburg-based political historian Oliver Bateman said: “The recent spate of criticism aimed at Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign from various right-wing influencers has exposed growing tensions within the younger, more ideologically extreme fringes of the American right.

“The conflicting priorities – arguably irreconcilable – are a real danger to the GOP.”

Joe Rogan, who hosts the most downloaded podcast in America, came out in support of the independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. “He doesn’t attack people,” Rogan said in an unmistakable slight of Trump. “He’s the only one that doesn’t attack people. He attacks actions and ideas, but he’s much more reasonable and intelligent.”

After facing the wrath of Trump and some of his stauncher Make America Great Again supporters, Pool backed down and Rogan clarified that he was not officially endorsing RFK.

Rogan has long had a complicated relationship with Trump, but his regular platforming of controversial hard-right guests has drawn in the sort of audience Trump wants and needs as he continues to slip in the polls. A survey by YouGov last year found that 81 per cent of Rogan’s listeners were male and 56 per cent were under 35 years old.

Rogan’s position spoke to a wider political shift. Kennedy – part-time environmental lawyer, full-time conspiracy theorist and nephew of the late president John F Kennedy – has been courting radicals and isolationists on both the far-left and the hard-right who are looking for an alternative to Trump. Kennedy is a former Democrat turned independent, a Covid and Holocaust denier who also claims to have a brain worm.

“RFK is the vessel through which some of this disfranchisement is being placed,” Madrid said. “In a race where margins are going to determine the outcome, a couple of points could be everything. If Robert F Kennedy is getting two, three points in places like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, that puts all of those states very much in play for Harris.

“Trump’s base are not reliable voters, so unless they’re really passionately engaged, they’re just not going to show up.”

THE TIMES