When co-host Danielle Moodie of The New Abnormal politics podcast read a recent CrimeReads piece by author Timothy Egan about Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, she got chills down her spine. Not just because Stephenson was a convicted rapist, murderer, and cannibal, but also because his behavior and leadership style—from the statements he’d make to his ideology—eerily resembles Donald Trump’s.
Egan, author of A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, joined Danielle on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal to talk about his work and research on the KKK and how Trump is mirroring one of the group’s most grotesque members.
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“D.C. Stephenson is a classic American character. He says, ‘I’m just a nobody from nowhere,’ but he’s got the gift of gab. He says things that people want to hear. He plays to their fears. He blames their failures on other people, that it’s not your fault that your life has fallen apart. It’s these awful other people. And he rolls into Indiana as a grifter and a drifter, and in four short years controls 21 states of the largest realm of the Ku Klux Klan the world has ever seen,” explains Egan.
“He has a plane with [a] KKK logo at the bottom of it. It’s a 98-foot yacht that he entertains senators and guests on… He throws these wild parties with naked women popping outta cakes. He’s a rapist. He’s a conman, he’s a liar. He tells 20 lies before he gets out of bed in the morning.”
The most Trumpian thing about him, though, says Egan, is that Stephenson, after being charged with raping and cannibalizing those women, calls the whole thing “a smear and a hoax and a witch hunt.”
Egan shares more similarities between the two (the word “reincarnation” is used) and the reason he believes that everyone stood behind this person, despite knowing he was a monster.
It’s the same reason both he and Danielle muse that the Republican party has turned into the Party of Trump.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
