#Donald Trump’s Long Rant Thrilled David Duke, But Alienated Many Others

As Donald Trump shouted for 76 minutes on Thursday night about how horrible everything is in the dystopian fiction he’s confused for America, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan found himself nodding along in agreement.

So the white supremacist David Duke, who was nearly elected governor of Louisiana in 1991 by channeling white resentment, posted a rave review of the address on Twitter.

Trump’s fear-mongering speech — which featured a chilling distillation of his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States in the line, “We don’t want them in our country!” — was also praised by Geert Wilders, a Dutch nationalist politician who was in the hall.

In an interview on Wednesday, Wilders pledged to “close the Dutch borders for immigrants from Islamic countries immediately,” if he becomes prime minister of the Netherlands next year.

Trump’s long, loud address went down less well with critics of the candidate, including members of his own party like Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012.

The speech, which in tone and content seemed like a sequel to the opening remarks of his campaign a year ago — when he hyped fears about Mexican immigrants being rapists and criminals — was also panned from the other side of the political spectrum, by Sen. Bernie Sanders, watching at home, and Medea Benjamin, a protester who interrupted Trump’s speech and was dragged from the hall.

Those negative reviews were amplified by an array of Trump critics, including the rapper Chuck D, the Russian dissident Garry Kasparov and a retired satirist, Jon Stewart, who borrowed Stephen Colbert’s Late Show desk to deliver some analysis.

All was not lost for the candidate, however, since the night did win him at least one well-known supporter, the former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, who was charged with securities fraud last year.

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from The Intercept ift.tt/2a1h5mW

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