Neo-Nazi groups are praising President Donald Trump for bringing their bigoted ideas and rhetoric into the mainstream of American politics. Over the years, multiple Democratic leaders have warned about this possibility.

Reuters reported on Friday that the Aryan Freedom Network, a Texas-based white supremacist group, is pleased with the direction that Trump has taken the country in. Co-leader Dalton Henry Stout told the outlet Trump has “awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years” and described the head of the Republican Party as “the best thing that’s happened to us.”

The white supremacists told Reuters they love Trump’s repeated praise of “Western values,” his attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and his opposition to immigration. Trump’s parroting of their brand of hate has reportedly increased interest and recruitment in the group.

Aryan Freedom Network describes itself as a “white racialist” group and has called for white people to “take back our land.”

The unity between the Trump-led MAGA movement and previously ostracized white supremacist groups has occurred alongside a rise in white supremacist violence. In 2020, 13% of extremist demonstrations and violent acts involved white nationalists, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, as reported by Reuters. That has grown every year since, and by 2024, almost 80% of those events involved white supremacists.

In the future, it will be more difficult to obtain data on white supremacist violence because the Trump administration has cut or scaled back federal programs collecting such data and countering such domestic terrorism. Naturally, that is a boon to the movement.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that the most visible instance of political violence with white supremacist overtones was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That insurrection was led by pro-Trump forces and initiated by Trump as a way to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. At the beginning of his second term, Trump pardoned many of the offenders, thereby sanctioning their violent acts.

Echoing the white supremacist movement, Trump has repeatedly sought to erase gains made during the historic Civil Rights movement. His administration has purged acknowledgement of milestone accomplishments by Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ Americans.

As part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s attack on government agencies, racists loyal to Trump benefactor Elon Musk were installed and supported in the administration. Most notably, as part of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been deployed to engage in street-level thuggery to harass, manhandle, and abuse migrant populations and the communities that support them.

In one of the more open endorsements of the type of white supremacy that groups like Aryan Freedom Network espouse, Trump has gone about restoring statues and military base names meant to honor pro-slavery Confederates.

The administration’s allies are on a neo-Nazi kick as well. Musk has allowed pro-Nazi content to flourish and thrive on his social media site, X, formerly Twitter. Musk has expressed support for Nazi-affiliated parties around the world, including the extremist Alternative for Germany party.

On Fox News, host Greg Gutfeld recently argued that conservatives should tell each other “What up, my Nazi? Hey, what up, my Nazi?” to mock Americans’ sensitivities to racism. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, one of the biggest Trump backers in media, posted a meme on Wednesday that argued “We Are ALL Hitler” after Musk and Trump were criticized for making Nazi-style salutes.

The affiliation between Trump and the neo-Nazi right was a topic of concern raised by then-Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign last year.

“I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said last September.

Now the tragedy has come to pass.