Donald Trump’s hush money trial has highlighted the ugliness at the heart of his first presidential campaign in 2016. Not only did his allies at the National Enquirer “catch and kill” embarrassing stories, we learned during trial testimony, but they also worked feverishly to spread false stories, conspiracy theories and slurs against his political opponents. As former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified last week, sliming Trump’s enemies was as much a part of his deal as protecting Trump from stories about porn stars and Playboy models.
The Enquirer’s flood of invective was only part of what was being unleashed by the MAGA trolls against Trump’s critics and opponents.
As awful as all of this was, a new book by author Nancy French, a prolific ghost writer for conservative figures, reminds us that the Enquirer’s flood of invective was only part of what was being unleashed by the MAGA trolls against Trump’s critics and opponents. It’s also a powerful and horrifying account of how a once fringe movement, the alt right, has come to occupy the central seat of the Republican Party.
With the Enquirer, we got a flood of salacious (and groundless) headlines like “Ted Cruz’s Father — Caught With JFK Assassin” and “‘Family Man’ Marco Rubio’s Love Child Stunner!” and “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson Left Sponge in Patient’s Brain.” And after Trump had dispatched his GOP rivals (many of whom dutifully fell into line to support Trump despite the smears) Trump and Pecker turned on Hillary Clinton, with screaming headlines about her health and what they alleged was “corruption” and “racism.” As author and MSNBC columnist Molly Jong-Fast notes in Vanity Fair, “Headlines like these saturated the checkout aisles in grocery stores, delis, and big-box retailers … a tactic Steve Bannon proudly coined as ‘flood the zone with s---.’”
In “Ghosted: An American Story,” French recounts the vicious racist attacks against her and her family after she and her husband, David French, a well-known conservative commentator who is now a New York Times columnist, broke with Trump.
Suffice it to say that the attacks were much worse than you remember.
In late 2015, online trolls seized on the existence of their daughter Naomi, who the Frenches had adopted from Ethiopia, as an attack tactic. In her book, French recalls the moment she saw the picture online: a photoshopped image of 7-year-old Naomi “in a gas chamber, with Donald Trump — wearing a Nazi uniform — pulling a lethal gas lever.”
There was more. Other online trolls photoshopped the girl’s face onto images of enslaved people and identified her with racial slurs that don’t bear repeating here.
“The alt right tried to inflict as much personal pain as they could on us, in the most intimate ways possible. These radicalized Trump supporters harassed us, mocked us, maligned us, and believed we should lose our jobs, and — at least according to our email inboxes — our lives,” French writes.
The incident would portend a broader trend. In 2016, as French points out in “Ghosted,” the alt-right was not synonymous with the Republican Party in the way it is today but it “both affected and influenced the GOP.” Over the past eight years both Trump and his loudest cheerleaders have legitimized and amplified language and ideas that had once been confined to the darker corners of the right-wing fever swamps. Writes French: “Alt right cheerleader Bannon was Trump’s most trusted advisor, and Trump himself retweeted the same sort of alt right accounts that had attacked us.”
The hate became a torrent.
White nationalist websites began labeling David French a “cuckservative,” a racist and sexist term suggesting that he was a racial “cuckold.” Alt-right trolls spun their family makeup into ugly comments: “Instead of having another child of their own, they deliberately decided to adopt someone who is alien to them — genetically, racially, culturally — as possible.” And it got worse, evolving into faked photos of French edited to depict pornographic and racist images.
In 2016, as French points out in 'Ghosted,' the alt-right was not synonymous with the Republican Party in the way it is today.
In 2019, the Trump-supporting magazine American Greatness published a blatantly racist poem titled “Cuck Elegy,” which accused “parasites” of surrendering to the “mocha-skinned” and “low-life reprobates.” In case the references were too subtle, the magazine accompanied the poem with a photo of David and Naomi French.
As French writes, “this was not fringe.” The harassment she and her family endured marked an ugly turning point of sorts, as language and imagery that was once restricted to far-right racist websites edged closer to the Trumpified mainstream. As The New York Times’ Jane Coaston noted at the time the poem was published, American Greatness was “a publication that is attempting to put meat on the bones of Trumpism, so to speak.” At the time, David French worked for National Review magazine, and one of his colleagues, Victor Davis Hanson, was a prolific contributor to American Greatness. And at the time, National Review’s editor Rich Lowry noted that American Greatness “imagines itself an intellectually serious tribune of Trumpism.”
Despite those pretensions to seriousness, the editors of the Trump-aligned magazine continued publishing content that attacked the Frenches.
In 2016, Nancy wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, recounting her sexual abuse as a child at Bible school, titled, “What it’s like to experience the 2016 election as both a conservative and a sex abuse survivor.” But when she spoke out on the sexual abuse allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a writer for American Greatness, Julie Kelly, mocked her trauma.
“OK — Nancy French screwed around with her preacher when she was a teen,” Kelly posted on the platform then known as Twitter. “So IF Kavanaugh groped a girl 36 years ago, he can’t be on SCOTUS?”
“That tweet was a punch in the stomach,” French writes in her book. “To discredit me, Kelly used the common tactic of the alt right cruelty. She sexually weaponized her insult instead of dealing with my actual arguments.”
In 2019, the Aspen Institute featured a panel that included both French and Christopher Buskirk, the editor and publisher of American Greatness, titled “Can the Republican Party Survive the Alt Right?” (In the spirit of transparency, I helped moderate that panel.) French writes that Aspen’s decision to invite the publisher of American Greatness to talk about the alt-right “was akin to asking an arsonist to give advice on putting out fires,” adding, “but they did not ask me for my advice.”
Until at least 2021, Buskirk was a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His website lists that he has been published by The Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and The Hill. He’s been featured on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” "PBS Newshour" and on CNN.
And, for Nancy French, that is the point: “This casual racism and brutality was not pushed by a fringe element,” she writes in her book. “It had become the main political strategy of many conservatives. These people spouting conspiracy theories and shouting invectives were now embedded, wrapped up, and intertwined with mainstream Republicans.”
French’s book is damning proof of the scope of damage wrought by that transition of the alt-right, from fringe to mainstream, which Trump helped usher into the Republican Party.
