Trump supporter calls the KKK 'leftists' in heated debate with African American analyst on CNN during Super Tuesday

Political commentator and Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord said the Ku Klux Klan is a 'leftist' organization during a sizzling clash with former Obama staffer Van Jones during a CNN Super Tuesday debate.

Lord, who wrote a book entitled What America Needs: The Case For Trump, went head-to-head with CNN's Van Jones during a discussion about Trump's reluctance to disavow the support of former KKK leader David Duke.

Things became heated when fellow contributor S.E. Cupp, a conservative, accused Trump of 'crazy, dog-whistle policy proposals' to win the support of prejudiced voters.

He said: 'Donald Trump has tried to otherize every other candidate in this race....to sort of scare this very small part of the electorate who thinks that all of their problems are the fault of people who don’t look like them'.

Lord leaped to The Donald's defense and rounded on the Republican establishment, saying 'their view of civil rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club'.

At this point, Jones intervened and said: 'The things that Donald Trump has done - and not just in this race - are horribly offensive'. 

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Jeffrey Lord (left) called the Ku Klux Klan 'a leftist organization' during a heated debate with analyst Van Jones (right) on CNN. He went on to say the Ku Klux Klan was 'the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic party'

He continued: 'There is a dark underside here. … He is whipping up and tapping into and pushing buttons that are very, very frightening to me and frightening to a lot of people'.

Referring to Trump's refusal to denounce the KKK in an interview Sunday before eventually doing so on Twitter, Van Jones said: 'Playing funny with the Klan, that is not cool'.

Before suggesting The Donald is selective when it comes to his fight against terrorism: 'I know this man [Trump] when he gets passionate about terrorism,' Jones said. 'I know how he talks about terrorism. The Klan is a terrorist organization'.

At this point Lord interrupted Jones, saying: 'A leftist organization'.

He later said: 'It is wrong to understand that these are not leftists. They were the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic party.'

Lord seemed to be referring to the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan, when some conservative Democrats resisted Reconstruction policies after the Civil War.

Jones angrily replied: '“What difference does it make if you call them leftists?. Call them chipmunks! They kill people. Don’t play games with that. 

The terrorist arm of the Democratic party? Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord reminded CNN contributor Van Jones how in the 1870s the Klan was a near-surrogate for a Democratic Party

Trump has been called out for insufficiently rebuking David Duke (pictured), a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and his white supremacist politics

'I don't care how they voted 50 years ago. I care about who they killed'.

To which Lord quipped: 'I care about American history. It counts'.

Two days before, Lord called former KKK Grand Wizard Duke 'a hardcore leftist' in another CNN interview.

Lord has a history of bringing up allegations of white supremacy in the Democratic party. He wrote a 1900-word article in the Wall Street Journal in 2008, pointing out the 'missing' parts of the party's history - most of them after the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement.

However, historians agree that the historical Democratic party has little to do with what it is today as both Republican and Democratic ideologies have shifted in the past decades.

'The simple fact is that, despite surface similarities, the Republican and Democratic parties of mid-century were vastly different beasts than their contemporary counterparts,' Slate chief political correspondent Jamelle Bouie wrote in 2014.

'Unlike the ideologically coherent parties of today (i.e., most Democrats are liberals and most Republicans are conservatives), the Republicans and Democrats of the immediate post-war period were heterodox coalitions of interest and historical circumstance.'

Bouie, writing about a different case, said at the time it was 'silly' to refer to the Ku Klux Klan as a paramilitary faction of the Democratic party while making a connection with modern politics.

'Yes, in the 1870s, the Klan was a near-surrogate for a Democratic Party that was fundamentally different in terms of its constituency and ideology than the one we’ve had for the last half-century,' he wrote.

Trump told ABC on Tuesday he disavowed all forms of racism and bigotry and said he was a champion of equality.

He gave the example of his 'inclusive' Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and said the establishment had set a new standard in the area by accepting all would-be members in the 1990s.

Despite his assurances, Trump has been unable to avoid a murky association with the violent and racist KKK group. 

Last year he was forced to deny the veracity of a 1927 New York Times report that said his father Fred Trump was arrested during a KKK riot in 1927.

The report listed 'Fred Trump' as one of the people taken in during a 'free-for-all' battle between police and 1,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The address in the article also matches that of Trump's father in Queens.

At the time, he would have been just 21, long before he became a self-made millionaire as a real estate developer.

Trump however told Daily Mail Online that his father had not been arrested and that it was impossible he could have been, as it would have prevented him getting business licenses in the future.

Last year Donald Trump was forced to deny the veracity of a 1927 New York Times report that said his father Fred Trump was arrested during a KKK New York riot in 1927

'This is ridiculous,' he said.

'He was never arrested. He has nothing to do with this. This never happened. This is nonsense and it never happened.

'This never happened. Never took place. He was never arrested, never convicted, never even charged.

'It's a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took place.

'Think – if it had, he would never have been able to get licenses in New York for anything associated with his business, with construction. This is just bizarre and untrue. 

The article stated that '1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all' during a May parade.

Their anger had been prompted by claims that 'Roman Catholic' police officers from the NYPD had earlier stopped Klansmen taking part in a Memorial parade - and beaten them.

The Times reported that a KKK flyer claimed: 'Native-born Protestant Americans clubbed and beaten when they exercise their rights in the country of their birth.'

Trump's father was born to German immigrants who came to this country in the early 1900s.

He began working in real estate when he was just 15, starting a company with his mother Elizabeth.

He went on to build single-family houses in Queens in the late 1920s and later supermarkets in the 1930s. He married Donald's mother Mary Anne in 1936. She was a Scottish immigrant from the Isle of Lewis, and the couple had five children.

He would go on to build barracks during World War II on the East Coast and then move into affordable housing, amassing an estimated fortune of $250million at the time of his death in 1999 as the result of pneumonia. 

WHO IS DAVID DUKE AND WHY COULD HIS SUPPORT FOR TRUMP BE TOXIC? 

David Duke is a one-term, ex-state representative from Louisiana and former KKK leader. A felon, he once ran for president himself as a Democrat, in 1988. That same year he switched his party affiliation to Republican and went on to win a Louisiana House seat in a special election.

He ran for president again in 1992 as a Republican but gained almost no traction in the primaries.

From 1974-1980 he was a part of the KKK. Duke says he left because he couldn't persuade members not to do 'stupid or violent things. Instead, he formed his own pride organization - the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

In an exclusive interview with Fusion's Jorge Ramos, former Mexican President Vicente Fox said he's troubled by the show of support the Republican presidential frontrunner received at the Nevada caucus.

Rubbing elbows with Duke and his supporters can be costly. Republican Congressman Steve Scalise - the third highest-ranking GOP member of the House- was urged to resign in 2014 after his 2002 attendance at an Duke group meeting was unearthed. 

He apologized and kept his House seat, but the kerfuffle is evidence of the toxicity that even a thin relationship with Duke can bring.

Duke tethered himself to Trump and said on his show, the David Duke Radio Program, 'I'm not saying I endorse everything about Trump. In fact, I haven't formally endorsed him.

'But I do support his candidacy, and I support voting for him as a strategic action. I hope he does everything we hope he will do.'