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Alt-Right trolls of 2016 distance themselves from Trump 

Fellow travellers on the far Right are turning against one another. Credit: Getty

August 24, 2024 - 8:00pm

Many of the noisiest influencers and trolls of the alt-Right who soared to online fame around 2016 have turned against one another in the years since, engaging in internecine public conflicts. In some cases, they’re attempting to push Donald Trump and his campaign in a more aggressive, radical direction which more closely resembles the spirit of 2016.

Richard Spencer, the Unite the Right rally organiser who once led chants of “Hail Trump” during a 2016 speech as some audience members raised their hands in Nazi-inspired salutes, no longer supports the Republican candidate. This summer, he pledged to vote for Biden — “dementia and all” — despite remaining Right-wing himself, because of his distaste for J.D. Vance and the GOP establishment. He has since suggested — albeit with questionable sincerity — that he supports Kamala Harris, and he has pushed back against Right-wing conspiracies about the Deep State targeting Trump. “The government is not trying to kill Donald Trump,” he wrote. “The government is ready to give Donald Trump the keys to the kingdom.”

Spencer’s turn against his onetime hero is part of a broader trend of the former president’s 2016 supporters from fringe online spaces now considering themselves essentially too Trumpy for Trump, believing the Republican candidate has been steered in the wrong direction by a cabal of donors and advisors.

Nick Fuentes, a young far-Right influencer and Holocaust denier, attended the 2017 Unite the Right Rally as well as the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In the days before the latter event he said: “Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.”

Three years later, Fuentes has become critical of Trump and is waging what he calls a “new Groyper war” against the Republican campaign. “We support Trump, but his campaign has been hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, & donors that he defeated in 2016, and they’re blowing it. Without serious changes we are headed for a catastrophic loss,” he has said. Fuentes has been calling for a return to the rhetoric of the 2016 campaign, and took credit when Trump brought his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski back into the fold last week. He argued that the far–Right commentators who began criticising the campaign earlier this month were a result of the “Groyper war”.

Fuentes had a falling-out with onetime ally Milo Yiannopoulos, the provocateur who, alongside Steve Bannon, turned Breitbart into the “platform for the alt-right”. Yiannopoulos has accused Fuentes, who was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee, of turning over his own supporters’ names and private information to the federal government in exchange for leniency and being taken off the no-fly list. He also claimed Fuentes encouraged protesters to enter the Capitol building in January 2021, the implication being that he either did so at the request of the federal government, or that he received leniency for those actions in exchange for informing on others.

Yiannopoulos has turned against many of his former fellow travellers on the Right, and attacked Candace Owens following the commentator’s alleged antisemitism and departure from the Daily Wire, expressing that she had “poor judgement”. Remaining conspiratorial, he recently speculated that Harris running mate Tim Walz’s son had been molested and that Owens’s husband is secretly gay.

Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theory enthusiast, provocateur and longtime Trump supporter, was banned from most social media platforms, along with Lyft and Uber Eats, for her comments on Islam during the mid-2010s. She’s remained a staunch supporter of the former president in the years since, but more recently has expressed criticism of the Trump campaign in a similar vein to Fuentes, urging more aggression.

While the ex-president’s inner circle views Loomer as a liability, Trump himself has often shared her posts on social media and been friendly with her at public events. His loose ties to these influencers have landed him in hot water on several occasions, such as when rapper Kanye West brought Fuentes to what was meant to be a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

Trump has since said he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and Yiannopoulos, who was an advisor to West at the time, has taken credit for the stunt. Trump similarly has never granted Loomer a role in his administration or campaign, despite her publicly vying for one, and he condemned Spencer and his supporters following the “Hail Trump incident”. It seems, then, that the frustration alt-Right influencers feel toward Trump and his campaign may be mutual.


is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

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Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago

The unhinged have decided not to support the stupid. Yawn.
None of this matters as Trump craters in the polls and his public utterances become more and more lunatic. He’s done and the opinions of the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos are worthless.

T Bone
T Bone
3 months ago

“We were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right, the significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires. What we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.”

El Uro
El Uro
3 months ago
Reply to  T Bone

She must not only know all the questions in advance, but also memorize short answers to them in sentences of no more than 5 words each.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
3 months ago
Reply to  T Bone

You been listening to Trump’s nonsense recently?
He makes Harris sound like Cicero!

Johannes Kreisler
Johannes Kreisler
3 months ago

You still don’t get it. Elections have nothing to do with Trump or Harris or whichever candidate. A candidate is just a proxy for the idea their party stands for, nothing more. Trump could be a plank of wood or a gerbil and Harris the second coming of Albert Schweitzer, still that wouldn’t matter – voting for Trump is crucial to avert the leprosy Harris and her neomarxist goons would inflict on not only the USA but globally as well.
Sure Trump is a bit of an unpolished t**d at times, but if he picks the adequate minds requisite for policymaking, that’s all what matters.
Elections are not about persons.

Victor James
Victor James
3 months ago

Why is this a thing? Harris campaign is saturated with racists who she endorses. Look at her comments when the ‘regime riots’ of BLM were happening. She was there, urging them on, and on, and on. Unherd is simple massively herd.

General Store
General Store
3 months ago
Reply to  Victor James

Yet another article trying to slur by association. Saying Richard Spencer has any relation to Trump or ‘the right’ is plainly ridiculous. He’s a nobody, followed by nobody. There are probably 5000 actual nazis in all of America – outside the Democratic fold that is. His racial-identity politics only have traction on the intersectional left. National-SOCIALISM. Yiannopoulos is a sometimes funny shit stirrer…..So what the hell is the point of this article? Just click-bait to get the ‘Alt right’ tag into a title. Tedious

Johannes Kreisler
Johannes Kreisler
3 months ago

What a weirdly disconnected article. Is anyone in 2024 not even vaguely aware of who/what/where, which social outfits horseshoed themselves wholesale into the kremlin/BRICS komintern sector and who retained their sanity?
Hinkle, Fuentes, and a good few other names were unhinged bolshevist tinfoilhatters long before the ruski invasion, let alone 7/10. To shove that mob into the same category as Yannopoulos or Loomer is preposterous.

And “trolls”, seriously?? The 2000s passed quite some while ago.