One of the biggest news stories of the week was Donald Trump’s wishy-washy deflection of an endorsement by Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, and that it barely dented his support (Trump won two primaries — Kentucky and Louisiana — on Saturday).
Watch: SNL gave Donald Trump a brutal KKK-themed campaign ad to use
Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
This didn’t go unnoticed by the folks at Saturday Night Live, who put together a scathing satirical ad for Trump featuring “real Americans” voting for the man. The ad uses a lot of popular talking points — that Trump creates jobs, that Trump is an outsider, that Trump will make America great again — but then there’s a slow, ghastly, reveal that these people are probably just as fond of David Duke as they are of Trump.
The ad is a shot against both the ugliest backers of Trump’s campaign and the people who, in spite of these endorsements, are still blindly loyal to him.
It’s impossible to imagine this kind of imagery — KKK hoods, Nazi swastikas, and white supremacy— leveled at any other candidate without it seeming like a gross exaggeration or extremely disingenuous. But with the way Trump played coy with Duke’s endorsement and his extreme popularity among white supremacists, here we are.
