White grievance is the Trump card

Thomas Edsall’s latest survey (gift link) of academic perspectives on Trump’s appeal to enough of the electorate to give him a roughly 50/50 chance of regaining the presidency emphasizes that relatively few white Trump supporters think of themselves as white supremacists, and almost all reject the idea that they are in any way racist.

Instead, the core of Trump’s white support includes many people who believe that white people in America are losing ground to non-whites because of policies that unfairly favor the latter.

Arlie Hochschild studied people in a Kentucky congressional district that is the whitest and the second-poorest in the nation:

The people I talk to do not believe they are racist and are insulted when they see themselves so described on CNN. They roundly rejected a 2017 white nationalist march through Pikeville, Ky., led by the neo-Nazi, Matthew Heimbach. Many I talked to were proud to have the first integrated cemetery, and there are town markers commemorating an early century Black female poet.

But they also sense themselves sinking and are threatened — by, in order of importance, immigrants, refugees, Blacks, women, highly educated “elites” — who are doing better than they are — and feel these categories are favored by the Democrats over them. They feel the Democrats are consumed by ‘identity politics’ and have, because of it, wiped white men off the Democratic social map.

Most of Trump’s appeal is based, I argue in “Stolen Pride,” on his call to turn the shame of white, non-B. A. downward mobility into blame. Primary among the many targets of blame are immigrants, but secondary are Blacks and women — sort of ‘secondary immigrants’ threatening to replace white males in the status hierarchy.

Now if you believe that there’s a “natural ” social hierarchy in which white males are always going to be on top absent perverse government intervention, that sounds pretty white supremacist — not to mention misogynist — but if you’re looking for coherent thinking about these things Kentucky’s 5th congressional district might not be the place to go.

The bottom line:

With three weeks to go in the campaign, Robert Jones, founder and president of P.R.R.I. and author of “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,” wrote by email:

We’re rapidly running out of superlatives to describe how extreme Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has become. He’s clearly amped up his harsh and violent rhetoric. Even in 2020, his rhetoric largely focused on building a wall and keep out undocumented immigrants. But in 2024, his rhetoric has shifted almost exclusively to talking about immigrants as the deranged and violent enemy who has already invaded the country.

He talks about immigrants slitting the throats of housewives in their kitchens and raping young girls and promises mass arrests, militarized encampments, and deportation. His rhetoric has now moved — there’s really no other way to say it — fully into Nazi territory. He has called immigrants “not human” and referred to them as “animals.”

More disturbingly, Jones added,

Trump has taken his supporters with him on this extremist journey. In 2013, a majority (53 percent) of Republicans supported a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally; by 2019, that number had dropped to 39 percent.

Today, two thirds of Republicans (64 percent) and a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) agree even with Trump’s dehumanizing assertion, echoing Hitler’s arguments in “Mein Kampf,” that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ We know these words are the bricks paving the road to political violence and even genocide.

Perhaps even more disturbing: Trump has at least a 50-50 chance of once again becoming president.

I’d take the “perhaps” out of that sentence.

For informational purposes only: With three weeks to go in the 2020 election, Joe Biden was up by 10.5% in the 538 composite. Harris is currently up by 2.4%.