Richard Spencer : Trump's hate group statement sounded "hollow and vapid"

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. ? Richard Spencer, the 39-year-old white nationalist leader, said Monday that he did not take President Donald Trump’s statement denouncing hate groups seriously, and two of Spencer’s associates shared a somewhat similar sentiment with HuffPost.

The statement today was more Kumbaya nonsense,” Spencer said, speaking to reporters in his office and part-time home in Alexandria, Virginia. “He sounded like a Sunday school teacher. I just don’t take him seriously ... it sounded so hollow and vapid.”

A man who worked with Spencer and who called himself just Reinhard beckoned reporters upstairs to a makeshift office. The liquor cabinet was stocked with Cutty Sark whiskey and Bombay Dry Gin, the bookcase stacked with The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, the German philosophy book Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a blow-up doll of what appeared to be  Pepe the Frog  (a character co-opted by white nationalists) and a “Make America great again” hat

Another associate, Nathan Damigo, a white supremacist and Marine veteran who was filmed punching a 95-pound female protester in Berkeley, California,  earlier this year, also told HuffPost he was not too worried about Trump’s statement. Damigo was “disappointed” in Trump, but the president’s “statements were vague, they were ambiguous, and oftentimes people in his position will talk that way to skirt around difficult issues,” he said. “When Trump says that he denounces racism, that could mean many different things to different people.”

Given Trump’s relationship with the so-called alt-right ? a new word for white nationalism ? during the campaign, it’s not particularly surprising that Monday’s speech did not resonate with people actually accused of spreading hate. Last year, Trump initially failed to denounce former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, a Trump supporter, instead saying, “ I know nothing about white supremacists. You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.”

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