During President Trump’s first turn in the White House, right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys were on the streets, weekend after weekend, raising their voices — and oftentimes their fists — about issues such as immigration, the squelching of conservative speech and the removal of Confederate-era statues.
But in the first seven months of Mr. Trump’s second term, there has been a conspicuous absence of far-right demonstrations. And that, some leaders of the movement say, is because the president has effectively adopted their agenda.
“Things we were doing and talking about in 2017 that were taboo, they’re no longer taboo — they’re mainstream now,” said Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, who took part in many of those early far-right rallies. “Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?”
Whether it is dismantling diversity programs, complaining about anti-white bias in museums or simply promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism, Mr. Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.
His administration has also hired several people with a history of making racist or antisemitic remarks or who have looked favorably on the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Far-right figures have been particularly thrilled by Mr. Trump’s aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants, praising not only the ubiquitous images of masked federal agents raiding farms and factories, but also the ideology that has fueled those moves: a belief that migration to the United States is all but synonymous with a military invasion.
Last week, in fact, on the eighth anniversary of the violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where neo-Nazis marched by torchlight chanting about immigrants and Jews, Augustus Sol Invictus, a Florida lawyer who helped organize the event, marveled at how thoroughly the Trump administration had adopted a position that had once been on the fringes of political discourse.
“Eight years ago you were an extremist if you protested being replaced by immigrants,” Mr. Invictus wrote on social media. “Your life was over if you talked about stopping or reversing it. Now it is official @WhiteHouse policy.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, offered a vocal defense of Mr. Trump. “President Trump is a voice for millions of forgotten men and women who support the widely popular policies he is enacting,” she said.
During the Biden administration, far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were severely hobbled, largely by the criminal prosecutions of dozens of their members who took part in the Capitol attack.
The Oath Keepers, a militia-style group of current and former military and law enforcement personnel, barely exists anymore. Its founder, Stewart Rhodes, no longer appears in public as often as he once did at far-right demonstrations or standoffs with the government.
As for Mr. Tarrio, he and his compatriots have generally given up on the set-piece demonstrations that they took part in for years in cities like New York; Berkeley, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles; New Orleans; and Charlottesville. These days, he mostly hosts podcasts and promotes a blockchain-powered app called “ICERAID” that pays people in cryptocurrency for reporting undocumented immigrants.
While some far-right groups, like the fascist organization Patriot Front, have continued to stage public demonstrations, researchers at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a nonprofit organization that tracks political violence, have found far fewer right-wing protests this year compared with recent years.
In addition to the disruptions stemming from the Jan. 6 criminal prosecutions, some experts in far-right extremism say that the relative quiet of extremists is because the Trump administration has enacted much of their agenda.
“The rise of alt-right a decade ago was a backlash against the first Black president and ideas of progress in race and immigration,” said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “Now, a decade later, we’ve seen the opposite of those ideas normalized in the highest levels of power, including at the White House.”
Echoing Mr. Tarrio, she added, “Why do you need to protest when the White House is basically doing what you want?”
Mr. Trump’s first term and the four-year interim when he was out of power were often characterized by flirtations with the far right — albeit conducted at a deniable distance.
In 2017, after a neo-Nazi activist drove into a crowd of leftist protesters in Charlottesville, killing a woman named Heather Heyer, Mr. Trump criticized the white nationalists who planned the demonstration. But in almost the same breath, he asserted that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict.
During a presidential debate in 2020, he called out to the Proud Boys, telling the extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” But within a day, he walked his comments back, saying he had no idea who the Proud Boys were.
He did much the same in November 2022, after having dinner with the infamous white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, quickly issuing a statement that he knew nothing about his houseguest or his views.
But this time around, Mr. Trump and his administration seem less interested in distance or denial.
On his first day back in the White House, he issued a remarkably sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 rioters who took part in the Capitol attack, including those who assaulted the police and were convicted — like Mr. Tarrio — of sedition.
He also issued two executive orders: “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” and “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” Both drew on language and ideas about immigrants that echoed statements made by violent extremists who attacked Hispanics in El Paso, the Black community in Buffalo and Jews in Pittsburgh.
The next month, Mr. Trump issued an executive order halting foreign aid to South Africa and allowing members of the country’s white minority to settle in the United States through a refugee program.
In the order, he said that American officials should do everything possible to help “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” The view effectively amounted to a government endorsement of long-held far-right theories about mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.
At the same time, his aides and allies, when confronted by racist or far-right views in those around them, have often chosen to ignore the situation or gone on the attack.
This winter, for example, a young employee of Elon Musk’s job-slashing agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, quit the government after it was revealed that he had posted racist comments online, including one that read, “Normalize Indian hate.”
But instead of letting the man go, Mr. Musk and Vice President JD Vance began a campaign to bring him back, breezily suggesting that his offensive remarks were merely indiscretions disclosed to the public by journalists who were out to destroy his life.
Around the same time, the State Department hired a man named Darren Beattie to serve as the acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Mr. Beattie was brought into the government even though he had already been fired from an earlier job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration for appearing at a conference attended by white nationalists.
Just months before his new appointment, Mr. Beattie was still posting racist messages online.
“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote on social media in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
(In July, Mr. Beattie’s portfolio expanded when he was named to run the U.S. Institute of Peace, which leads “public diplomacy outreach” at the State Department. A department spokesman, Tommy Pigott, defended the hire. “Darren Beattie has been an invaluable member of the Trump administration’s team at the State Department in implementing the president’s America First foreign policy,” he said.)
Mr. Trump’s Defense Department has hired Kingsley Wilson, the daughter of the conservative commentator Steve Cortes, to serve as deputy press secretary, despite her history of making extremist comments on social media.
Last year, Ms. Wilson posted a message evincing support for the so-called great replacement theory, a far-right idea holding that liberals have purposefully sought to replace the white population of the United States with foreigners and immigrants.
In 2023, she posted another message questioning the facts behind the death of Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915. The consensus among legal scholars is that Mr. Frank was falsely convicted of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl, but Ms. Wilson’s post put the blame on Mr. Frank himself.
In a statement, Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that Ms. Wilson “has been doing a fantastic job” and that “left-wing groups have erroneously attacked” her character because she is “a fighter for President Trump.”
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent watchdog agency, is now being led by Paul Ingrassia, despite his history of making racist comments and supporting white nationalists like Mr. Fuentes.
In April 2023, Mr. Ingrassia wrote a Substack post calling on X to reinstate Mr. Fuentes’s account on First Amendment grounds. Eight months later, he posted a message on X saying, “Exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage.”
All of these developments have taken place as the official X account for Mr. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has posted some messages with thinly veiled white nationalist content.
Last week, for instance, the account, seeking new recruits for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, posted an image of Uncle Sam under a slogan reading, “America Needs You/Join ICE Now.” Above the image was a question: “Which way, American man?”
That appeared to be a reference to the 1978 book “Which Way, Western Man?” written by the white supremacist William Gayley Simpson and published by the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization. The book claims that there is a Jewish plot against white people in the Western world and calls for violence against Jews.
Asked by reporters about the post last week, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for D.H.S., called the question “embarrassing” and said, “Where are we quoting a white supremacist?”
A few days after Mr. Trump won re-election, William Teer, the leader of the Texas Three Percenters, a local far-right militia group, wrote to him with an offer: His organization wanted to help the White House carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants.
While there is no evidence that the administration accepted Mr. Teer’s proposal, it arguably did not need to. Homeland security officials, flush with billions of dollars from Mr. Trump’s recent budget bill, have been hiring new immigration agents and cracking down with new initiatives like encouraging officers to search the social media accounts of immigrants seeking to enter the country for anti-American sentiments.
That last measure appeared to enchant Kevin DeAnna, an early alt-right leader who often writes for a white nationalist website under the name of James Kirkpatrick. On Tuesday, Mr. DeAnna posted on social media about an article quoting a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services saying, “America’s benefits should not be given to those who despise the country and promote anti-American ideologies.”
“Got a little more of what I voted for again,” Mr. DeAnna wrote.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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