ANGELO CARUSONE: One thing that we've seen is 300 percent increase in growth for the leading white nationalist Twitter accounts. We’ve seen an enormous movement that has been fueled largely by men's right advocacy that is pumped into this notion of white genocide that white culture is eroding and being decayed. We saw the events in Charlottesville and other white nationalist protests for the first time ever, one of the leading white nationalist organizations tried to hold a national conference that Media Matters has actually gotten cancelled three times.

They've never tried to do that before, so there has been an emboldening, and I think it's also reflected in the information landscape. There's been a rise of alt-right and new-right media outlets, many of which have press credential. So I do think that, from a policy perspective, it's true, he has been deeply weakened and hasn't been able to effectuate many of his policies. But he has had a destructive impact on the information ecosystem and he has been able to really shape the courts in a very meaningful way as well.

For decades, there will be decisions that are being made by the nominees that have already been pushed through that were Trump appointees that will really shape and have an influence on our American society. So if you take just one step back, I think about on the popularity that's fine, but in a way it just means that he has more of an incentive to lean into the most extreme aspects of his supporters, and that does have destructive consequences and I do think that that is largely what people are experiencing on a day-to-day basis, is the anxieties and concerns that come out of dealing with sort of a cauldron of division and intense extremism.

Previously:

What is the “alt-right”? A guide to the white nationalist movement now leading conservative media

NBC just dangerously normalized the misogynistic, “alt-right”-associated society “Proud Boys”