KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
White nationalists were among the first to embrace Donald Trump's candidacy, and they celebrated after his election. Since then, the so-called alt-right has splintered. As Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports, the movement now looks a lot less potent than it once did.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Next week, white nationalists like Jared Taylor will celebrate a moment they've been waiting decades to see.
JARED TAYLOR: January 20 reflects a significant defeat for egalitarian orthodoxy.
MORRIS: Taylor promotes a very different orthodoxy, one in which race is central to innate abilities and national success. He's working to build a United States explicitly for white people. Trump arguably helps this by telling supporters that they're victims of a system that's rigged against them.
TAYLOR: I see Donald Trump as a kind of stepping stone. He is a step in the right direction in terms of understanding America and history and the world in essentially racial terms.
MORRIS: But white nationalist enthusiasm for Trump has fallen off substantially. And to understand that, it helps to go back to the heady days just after the election.
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RICHARD SPENCER: It's too much winning. Can someone please just stop winning? I don't want to win anymore, all right (laughter).
MORRIS: That's Richard Spencer, the guy who coined the term alt-right, telling a roomful of fellow radicals that Trump's victory has just sling-shotted white nationalism into the mainstream.
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SPENCER: And even if we're not quite in power yet, we should act like it.
MORRIS: But later that day, some of the audience responded to a speech by enthusiastically throwing up Nazi salutes.
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SPENCER: Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory.
MORRIS: And that's what got all the media attention.
KEVIN MACDONALD: Right after the election, I think there was euphoria. But as we get into it now, I think that there's more trepidation.
MORRIS: Kevin MacDonald is a retired evolutionary psychology professor at California State Long Beach and another white nationalist mainstay. He says Trump's appointments have also rattled the movement, especially his propensity for tapping rich Wall Street bankers.
MACDONALD: These are globalists in general. They love free trade. They love immigration - big red flags for us.
MORRIS: And MacDonald says he's concerned about the reliance on generals and hawkish policy leading America into another Middle East war.
MACDONALD: A lot of trepidation. But the big silver lining is Jeff Sessions.
MORRIS: Referring to Trump's nominee for attorney general, Macdonald hopes Sessions will clamp down on immigration. White nationalists also like secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson, who's seen as being close to Putin, a darling of the alt-right.
But despite its high hopes for the Trump administration, the radical right has largely gone to war with itself. And Mark Potok with the Southern Poverty Law Center says much of what was once called the alt-right has peeled away.
MARK POTOK: I mean, look; we are talking about a movement which spends literally more time attacking one another than they do their enemies.
MORRIS: No one has taken more fire from his ideological kinsmen lately than Richard Spencer. Like-minded radicals have disavowed the alt-right, even called Spencer an operative bent on the movement's destruction. In the media, he's always tied to those Nazi salutes.
SPENCER: I think it's good to be that person talked about even when it's negative. Our ideas are entering the discourse.
MORRIS: But Marilyn Mayo with the Anti-Defamation League argues that the so-called alt-right is watching its illusion of real world influence wither.
MARILYN MAYO: At some point, they may have felt that they could influence policy in some way. But I think that was really more of a pipe dream for them because they really are a fringe movement, and they're still a fringe movement.
MORRIS: So a movement that sprang from obscurity with Donald Trump's election seems to be dropping back into the shadows even before Trump takes power. For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris.