Hillary Clinton has a big speech to deliver in Nevada on Thursday, one she hopes will put her squarely ahead of Donald Trump among those who fear the rise of the “alt-right”—but she might be in for a tougher time than she expects.
According to Clinton, the “alt-right” movement, which is focused on white identity politics, has risen to prominence under Trump and must be stopped if Hillary intends to prevent the complete takeover of the Republican Party.
Yes, that’s right: Clinton intends to frame the decision to vote for Trump as a choice between the Republican Party that Democrats hated in the last election and this new, somehow worse Republican Party that they’re pretty sure they also hate.
An aide says Clinton won’t call Trump a “white nationalist” directly, but will point out that his legions of Internet fans and some recent additions to his team enjoy stoking the flames of “alt-right” ideology. The Democratic National Committee fired the first salvo this morning, with a Trump attack video that is mostly headlines from new campaign manager Steve Bannon’s former home, Breitbart News.
Clinton’s plan is a risky one, though. Obviously, she’s trying to split the GOP in an effort to, if not pull votes her way from moderate Republicans, encourage Republicans who don’t support the alt-right’s rhetoric not to cast a vote for the presumptive Republican nominee (because he’s not really Republican).
For Clinton, this attack only works if she can convince Republicans that she, her husband and her Democratic predecessor Barack Obama actually do like Republicans—and while some Democrats have expressed a bit of Mitt Romney nostalgia this past week, the party’s public face doesn’t quite support that.
Quite frankly, Republicans could probably be more easily convinced that it’s possible to reanimate Ronald Reagan and run him as a candidate in 2020 than that Hillary is nostalgic for the glory days of the “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.”
If anything, Hillary may provoke Trump to disavow his alt-right compatriots, something he’s hedged on doing, even when the alt-right has shown anti-Semitic and racist tendencies. But Republicans may already be settled on the question of Trump’s Twitter army: Either they believe he’s closely aligned with white nationalist forces on social media (and thus aren’t voting for him), or they think there’s enough distance that Trump’s Internet fandom doesn’t pose a threat.
Also a problem for Hillary: the alt-right is more Internet savvy than her campaign, which has struggled to adapt to the Internet age in a variety of hilarious ways, from emoji feedback to a sad, boring mobile game that allows users to win potted plants and sofa upgrades for a drab, second-floor campaign headquarters.
The alt-right could torture Hillary’s social media presence into oblivion, and not just while she ran for President—but well into her first term, should she win. After all, as with the Cincinnati Zoo’s ill-fated Harambe pleas, when you tell the Internet to stop doing something, you really only encourage it to continue, if just out of spite.
She’d be taking on the best of 4Chan’s activists, armed with endless blood-lust, mad Photoshop skills and at least one cartoon frog with social media cachet.