How Trump Happened
It’s not just anger over jobs and immigration. White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama.
By Jamelle Bouie
slate.com
“First they ignore you, then they laughat you, then they fight you, then youwin,” goes the line attributed toMahatma Gandhi. Typically, you’llfind this pearl adorning a classroom orsplashed across a motivational poster.But last month, on the eve of SuperTuesday—when a dozen states castballots for the Republican presidentialnomination—you could find it on Donald Trump’s Instagram page, the captionto a photograph of a massive rally in Alabama the day before.
Perverse as it may seem for the belligerent real estate magnate to channel evenapocryphal Gandhi wisdom, the line is apt. First, we did ignore him—as abuffoon who wouldn’t survive past the summer. Then, we laughed at him—as abuffoon who wouldn’t survive through fall. Eventually, Republicans began tofight him, terrified of his traction with voters. Now, he’s winning, with morevotes and delegates than anyone left in the field. On the eve of another criticalTuesday slate of votes, Trump is on the verge of an even greater victory. Pollsshow him in command both in the smaller states that will award their delegatesproportionally, and in the larger, winner-take-all prizes of Ohio and Florida. ByWednesday morning, Trump could be a stone’s throw from the Republicanpresidential nomination.
We’ve learned, by now, not to underestimate Donald Trump, but we’re stillstruggling to understand his rise. Why now? Why, when the United States isstronger and wealthier than it’s been since the Great Recession, are some voterssuddenly receptive to nativist demagoguery? How is Trump—who has beendescribed as a proto-fascist, if not an outright fascist—just a few steps awayfrom leading the Grand Old Party?
For some on the left, Trump is the result of decades of divisive politics—theinevitable outcome of a Republican political strategy that stoked white racialresentment to win elections. “Trump’s campaign can best be understood not asan outlier but as the latest manifestation of the Southern Strategy, which theRepublican Party has deployed for a half-century to shore up its support in theold Confederate states by appeals to racial resentment and white solidarity,”writes Jeet Heer in the New Republic.
For some on the right, Trump is the grassroots response to Republican elites whohave abandoned their working-class voters to the whims of laissez-fairecapitalism. “[T]he Republican Party, and the conservative movement, offer nextto nothing to working-class Trump supporters,” writes Michael BrendanDougherty in the Week. “There are no obvious conservative policies that willgenerate the sort of growth needed to raise the standard of living for theseworking-class voters.”
These explanations aren’t mutually exclusive; each touches on an importantelement of the Trump phenomenon. The Republican Party does have a traditionof harnessing white racial resentment to win elections, from the infamous“welfare queen” rhetoric of Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich labeling BarackObama the “food stamp president” during the 2012 presidential election. GOPelites have failed to offer solutions to struggling working-class whites, who havesuffered keenly from the collapse of the industrial economy. And it is true thatrapid, disorienting economic and cultural change has led a substantial group ofAmericans to turn to someone who disdains feckless politicians and pledges torestore the country’s strength.
But none of these theories answer the question why now. Each of these forces hasbeen in play for years. Wages for working-class Americans have long beenstagnant, and the collapse of job opportunities for workers without a collegedegree was apparent in the 1990s, long before the Great Recession. What’smore, economic and social decline—as well as frustration with foreigncompetition, which Trump has channeled in his campaign—isn’t unique to whiteAmericans. Millions of Americans—blacks and Latinos in particular—have faceddeclining economic prospects and social disintegration for years without turningto a demagogue like Trump.
Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been centralenough to our understanding of Trump’s rise. Not only does he lead a movementof almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support instates and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Amongwhite voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to beassociated with greater support for Trump.
All of which is to say that we’ve beenmissing the most important catalyst inTrump’s rise. What caused this fire to burnout of control? The answer, I think, isBarack Obama.
There have been some conservativewriters who have tried to hang Trump’ssuccess on the current president,pointing to his putatively extremepositions. But in most respects, Obama is aconventional politician—well within thecenter-left of the Democratic Party. Or atleast, he’s governed in that mode, with an agenda that sits safely in themainstream. Laws like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and theAffordable Care Act weren’t impositions from the far left; they were built out ofproposals from the right and left, passed by a majority of Congress that waselected to pursue solutions on health care and the economy. Barack Obama ismany things, but conservative rhetoric aside, he’s no radical.
We can’t say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nationshaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much aradical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended tothe summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy support fromminorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part of Obama’scoalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest numbers ever in 2008.
For liberal observers, this heralded a new, rising electorate, and—in theory—adurable majority. “The future in American politics belongs to the party that canwin a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate,”wrote Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post after the 2008 election. “Itbelongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.”
For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity andcosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out ofnowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emergingDemocratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had electedGeorge W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longermatter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion.When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused bythe Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had alwaysplaced white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t givematerial benefits.
In a 2011 paper, Robin DiAngelo—a professor of multicultural education atWestfield State University—described a phenomenon she called “whitefragility.” “White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racialstress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” she writes.“These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, andguilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racialequilibrium.”
DiAngelo was describing private behavior in the context of workplace diversitytraining, but her diagnosis holds insight for politics. You can read the rise ofObama and the projected future of a majority nonwhite America as a racialstress that produced a reaction from a number of white Americans—and forcedthem into a defensive crouch. You can see the maneuvering DiAngelo describesin the persistent belief that Obama is a Muslim—as recently as last fall, 29percent of Americans held this view, against all evidence. It is a way to markObama as “other” in a society where explicit anti-black prejudice is publiclyunacceptable. Consistent with this racialized fear and anxiety is the degree towhich white Americans now see “reverse discrimination” as a serious problem innational life. For its American Values Survey, the Public Religion ResearchInstitute asks respondents whether “discrimination against whites is a significantproblem.” In last year’s survey, 43 percent of Americans—including 60 percentof working-class whites—said discrimination against whites had become as big aproblem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.
The anxieties DiAngelo describes, and thefears cataloged by the American ValuesSurvey, have real political impact. In a2014 study, political scientists MaureenCraig and Jennifer Richeson tried tomeasure “perceived status threat” from ashift in racial demographics, surveyinghow people responded when informedthat California is now home to more blacks, Hispanics, and Asians than non-Hispanic whites. In other words, how do white Americans react to unrelatedpolitical questions when exposed to news of a “majority-minority” future? Theresults were clear. “Making the majority-minority shift in California salient ledpolitically unaffiliated white Americans to lean more toward the RepublicanParty,” wrote Craig and Richeson. Likewise, “making the changing national racialdemographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political partyaffiliation) to endorse both race-related and relatively race-neutral conservativepolicy positions more strongly.”
The Obama era didn’t herald a post-racial America as much as it did a racializedone, where millions of whites were hyperaware of and newly anxious about theirracial status. For example, during a Marco Rubio rally before the New Hampshireprimary in February, I spoke to a voter who, in her way, gave voice to thishyperawareness. “I think he’s divided this country in many ways,” said Lori, anolder white woman, of Obama. “I know in a lot of places in America there’s adivide in color … like, when I walk up to someone in the stores”—she looked atme to emphasize what she means—“I feel that they’re wondering if I like them. …I didn’t feel that before. I was accepting of everyone, and I hate that he broughtthat.”
This isn’t the first time in our history that whites have worried about losing theirpre-eminent status. In the early 20th century, massive Southern and EasternEuropean immigration, as well as Chinese immigration in the American West,fueled nativism and white racism, and helped lead to the resurrection of the KuKlux Klan. The revived Klan organized millions of white Americans in amovement against immigrants, blacks, and religious minorities like Catholics.This, along with a broader nativist movement, had an enormous impact onAmerican politics—entire states, like Indiana, were controlled by Klan-backedpoliticians while national lawmakers passed harsh, restrictive immigrationlaws. Our current burst of nativism and racial anxiety is proving to be a similarlypotent force.
“The election of the country’s first black president had the ironic upshot ofopening the door for old-fashioned racism to influence partisan preferences afterit was long thought to be a spent force in American politics,” wrote BrownUniversity political scientist Michael Tesler in a 2013 paper titled “The Return ofOld Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the EarlyObama Era.” For Tesler, “old-fashioned racism” isn’t a rhetorical term; it refersto specific beliefs about the biological and cultural inferiority of black Americans.His work suggests that there are some white Americans who, in his words, have“concerns about the leadership of a president from a racial group whom theyconsider to be intellectually and socially inferior.”
Other research points to the degree to which Obama’s election seems to haveexacerbated racial animus among white voters. In a paper titled “The Impact ofAnti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama’s Job Performance and onVoting in the 2012 Presidential Election,” a trio of researchers found asubstantial increase in the number of voters with anti-black attitudes, which rosefrom 47.6 percent in 2008 to 50.9 percent in 2012. “The proportion of peopleexpressing anti-Black attitudes,” they write, “was 32 percent among Democrats,48 percent among independents, and 79 percent among Republicans.”
What does anti-black racism in the Obama era have to do with Donald Trump,who crashed the 2016 campaign with a wave of anti-Latino rhetoric?
Trump may have started this campaign by denigrating Latinos and Muslims, buthis first appearance in the Obama era was in the context of anti-black racism. In2011, Trump took the “birtherism” conspiracy—the belief that Obama is foreign-born and thus an illegitimate president—and turned it into a full-fledgedmovement. Even now, his supporters believe Obama is illegitimate—62 percentsay he is a Muslim, and 61 percent that he was born in another country. I spoketo a voter who echoed this sort of othering anti-Obama rhetoric in Las Vegas, ata Trump event the day before the Nevada caucuses. “In my opinion, Obama isthe most anti-American president that I have experienced. He bows down toevery other country. He puts other countries before America,” explained Martin,a staunch backer of the real estate mogul.
More recently, anti-black racism has returned to the fore, with behavior thatattracts those who would like to see the old racial hierarchy restored. He sharesracist memes on Twitter and has built a symbiotic relationship with whitenationalists, refusing a chance to repudiate former Klan leader David Dukeduring one interview and offering his son for an interview with a white-nationalist radio host. And in recent weeks, Trump supporters have attackedblack protesters at his rallies. At an event in North Carolina, a protester waspunched in the face by an audience member, while another yelled a racist slur.Afterwards, Trump condoned the behavior. “He was swinging, he was hittingpeople, and the audience hit back,” he said, despite no evidence of any attackfrom the protester. “That’s what we need more of.”
In St. Louis, Missouri, a Trump rally collapsed into scuffles between supportersand opponents, with multiple arrests. At a Kentucky rally—the same day Trumppromised to defend supporters in court if they fought with demonstrators—twoprotesters were assaulted by members of a white-supremacist group. On Fridayevening, demonstrators in Chicago held a mass rally against an impendingTrump event, forcing the campaign to cancel. Trump blamed the ensuing meleeon “thugs."
None of this is to discount the material facts behind Trump’s appeal to working-class whites. The collapse of the industrial economy in the wake of the GreatRecession caused real devastation. The middle class has been losing ground fora long time, and there are few jobs for people without college degrees—or atleast, few jobs that hold a path to mobility. Even in places where new factorieshave cropped up, unions are sparse and wages are low, following a race-to-the-bottom among the towns and cities that vie for the remaining manufacturingjobs. When economic desperation meets hopelessness—as we saw in the 1980s,when an earlier wave of deindustrialization ravaged the inner cities—the resultsare tragic.
The effects of these trends were highlighted in a widely analyzed study releasedlast fall that showed rising mortality rates among middle- and working-classwhite Americans, the group that makes up Trump’s main body of support.Princeton University professor Anne Case and co-author Angus Deaton foundthat white working-class Americans are increasingly dying from suicide, alcoholabuse, and drugs. “In 1999,” writes Case for Quartz, “people in this group diedfrom accidental drug and alcohol poisonings at four times the rate of Americanswith a bachelor’s degree or more. By 2013, they were dying at seven times therate of their better-educated peers. In 2013, they also committed suicide at morethan twice the rate of people with more education, and died from alcoholic liverdisease and cirrhosis at five times the rate of those with a college degree.”
These spikes in mortality are so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they’velowered overall life expectancy. Young whites, meanwhile, face rising rates ofaddiction and a corresponding increase in mortality.
Canvas a Trump event and you’ll meet people who have seen these changes upclose. They are teachers, police officers, small-business owners, and cityemployees who hold the closest thing to middle-class jobs in the rural towns andolder suburbs where Trump draws his most ardent support. In the Michiganprimary, for example, Trump won most of his votes from voters with incomesless than $50,000; in New Hampshire, he dominated among voters making lessthan $100,000. Everywhere, in fact, Trump is winning Republicans with modestmiddle-class incomes.
These somewhat better-off Americans have seen their friends and family fall intodependency, whether to drugs or alcohol or welfare. They are both sympatheticto this plight—which is why Trump’s call for more help for veterans and seniorsresonates with them—but also frustrated and angry. The country, and itsleaders, made a promise: If you worked hard, you would get ahead. But thatdidn’t happen. Instead, for millions of Americans, it was the reverse: Theyworked hard and fell behind. They’re afraid, for themselves and for their children.Trump speaks for them. “What do we all want?” Trump asked at a rally on theeve of the Nevada caucus. “We want security. We want a strong country.” Thosewho feel insecurity most acutely have turned out to back the real estate mogulen masse.
With that said, perceptions of race informtheir embrace of Trump as well. In therecent past, holding the favored spot inour racial hierarchy brought benefits. Ashistorian and political scientist IraKatznelson details in When AffirmativeAction Was White: An Untold History ofRacial Inequality in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica, being white was traditionally apathway to middle-class security, the keythat won access to vital mortgage and education programs, as the federalgovernment worked to build a white middle-class in the middle part of the 20thcentury. Even after the civil rights movement and the end of formaldiscrimination against black Americans, it was still true that being white andmiddle-class offered protection from the worst of our economy’s ravages. Drugs,ghettos, and dependency existed among whites in pockets of the country, butthey were popularly understood as black and Latino problems, not white ones.Now, that isn’t true. Now, middle-class whites face addiction and dependence,which adds a racial element to economic anxiety, as the security provided bywhiteness no longer exists for many Americans.
There are objections to this narrative. It’s possible, for example, that Obama’sdecision to push forward with liberal policies and to galvanize a liberal baseproduced an inevitable partisan backlash, of which Trump is part. Had Obamagoverned more moderately, had he tried to find a space in his coalition for whiteworking-class voters, then Trumpism might have stayed in the deep.
But this analysis ignores the extent to which Trump reflects specific choices byRepublican and conservative elites. From indulging anti-Obama conspiracytheories to attacking him as an enemy of the United States, conservatives choseto nurture resentment and anxiety and distill it into something potent. You candraw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio—where figures like Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obamawould turn the world upside down. “The days of [minorities] not having anypower are over and they are angry,” said Limbaugh to his audience. “They wantto use their power as a means of retribution.”
It also ignores the degree to which these voters likely would have found thishypothetical partnership inimical to their conception of their interests. Even ifObama had reached out, they would be mere partners in a larger coalition,when what they want is to be its driving force. Trump speaks to that desire,signaling—in ways subtle and otherwise—that he plans to “Make America GreatAgain” by making the white American worker the center of his universe.
 Photo from "Postcards From America" by Mark Power/Magnum Photos
Throughout our history, a substantial minority of whites has responded toAmerica’s always-shifting racial and economic terrain with a primal fear of beingdominated, of finding themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy. It’s one of thestrongest forces in American life, and politicians and demagogues of manypartisan stripes channeled it long before Donald Trump; it’s so strong thatresearchers have found a direct and robust connection between a givencounty’s proportion of enslaved people before emancipation and its present-dayRepublican vote share. The more slaves held in a given area, the moreRepublican votes.
The good news is that movements like Trump’s tend to fade away. The bad newsis that, even in defeat, they are influential. One antecedent to Trump—AlabamaGov. George Wallace—never won a national party nomination. But he hadmassive impact on the direction of national politics, giving Richard Nixon rawmaterials for his “Southern Strategy” of racial resentment that would shape anddefine American politics for the next four decades.
For Americans opposed to Trump, it’s tempting to believe that his base is ashrinking part of America; that these are the death throes of racial reaction.Eventually, goes the thinking, they’ll fade from view too.
That is wishful thinking. America is a diverse country. But it’s still apredominantly white one, where a Trumpist movement can still encompassmillions of voters. And “eventually” might be a while. In the space between nowand then, Trumpism—the potent mix of open prejudice, nationalist aggression,and heterodox economic policy—could thrive. In fact, it likely will, since thetrends that produced Trump—a brittle economy, an ailing white working-class,an insecure white middle-class, a rising nonwhite population, political gridlock,and growing minority political power—are ongoing.
Given the more than uphill climb he would face in a general election, Trump theperson might have an expiration date. But Trumpism will enter the firmament ofmodern politics, a powerful current that will shape the future of the RepublicanParty, and the Democratic one too. Trump came on the stage as a clown. Butwhenever he leaves, he’ll do it as a new icon of a familiar movement in Americanlife.
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