EXCERPT. Donald Trump and David Duke Are Sinister Soul Brothers - by Mitch Landrieu
As a state legislator in Louisiana, Mitch Landrieu got a chance to observe telegenic Klansman David Duke up close. Now he’s watching Trump work the same act.
MITCH LANDRIEU
03.24.18 9:45 PM ET
Mitch Landrieu comes from a remarkable family of Louisiana politicians and leaders. In his new memoir, In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, he grapples with his own lifelong transformation on the issue of race, which culminated most famously in his 2017 order as mayor of New Orleans to remove four city statues associated with the Civil War and racism.
In the passage excerpted below, he describes his first-hand experience dealing with former Klansman David Duke in the Louisiana legislature in 1989, and how eerily Duke’s political career presaged the ascendancy of Donald Trump.
On most days during a legislative session, reporters casually follow the major bills as they move through hearings at committees, and you’d expect to see a few of the sponsors, and opponents quoted in the news. Overnight, reporters from far-away places who had never set foot in Baton Rouge showed up to do reports on Duke. National TV interviews, with mostly soft questions from anchors or talk-show hosts who didn’t do the hard reading about his past, allowed him to cast himself as a maverick and a celebrity. Men and women seated in the legislature watched this flood of attention with dread and a certain envy. Who wouldn’t want the spotlight he was getting?
With all this free publicity, he became a kind of folk hero overnight. Imagine what it felt like to many legislators who lived far from the New Orleans area, watching Duke sit at his desk in the House, opening up envelopes with checks from people all over, and notes presumably urging him on. One letter was simply addressed “Duke, Louisiana.”
I decided to be pragmatic and establish some form of contact, regardless of our glaring moral differences, while working resolutely to thwart his agenda. We had a conversation, and for the first half hour or so he came off as reasonable, a guy with a vote who might do the conventional horse-trading we all did in getting a given measure passed into law. But as the conversation went on, his eyes ranged away from direct contact and he started talking about the biological differences between the races, and the need to separate the races, that blacks would be better off in other countries. It was chilling.
Again, I could not stop thinking of Auschwitz. I remembered my prayers from that day and the commitment I made to stand up against this sort of evil. We must not let this happen again.
Here was a closet Nazi, sowing the seeds of new bigotry in Louisiana, while soft-pedaling his repulsive record toward Jews and blacks, pulling in money from people who saw him as standing up for the underdogs.
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