by Keith Boykin
Trump had learned a valuable lesson. There was great political and personal benefit for him in stirring up public outrage. By angering Black and brown people, he could win the support of disaffected white people. Attacking the nation’s first Black president without suffering any personal consequences taught Trump that he could continue these attacks on others. If he could go on live national television and lie about the president of the United States with impunity, what could stop him from attacking anyone else? In fact, he discovered he could actually grow in popularity among a certain segment of white Americans by continuing to attack people of color and the causes they supported. And this he did.
In 2014, he called for a ban on all flights coming from West Africa after an Ebola outbreak in three countries there. “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” Trump tweeted in all caps in July 2014. “THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS!” he tweeted a month later. It was, in Trump’s words, “Obama’s fault,” as he tweeted in October 2014. “Obama should apologize to the American people & resign,” he tweeted. There were only eleven cases of Ebola and two deaths in the entire United States when Trump called for Obama to resign, but in January 2021, when Trump left office as president with nearly twenty-five million coronavirus cases and more than 400,000 Americans dead, he had not only refused to resign, he had applauded his own shameful record of failure.
In 2015, he turned his attention to another group to demonize. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he announced. Trump wanted to ban nearly two billion people on the planet from coming to America. It was all part of a predictable pattern of offering simplistic solutions to complex problems, but in the eyes of Trump supporters, the problems were never that complex. The central problem was the loss of privilege. How do you deal with the absence of a white man in the Oval Office? Delegitimize the Black president. How do you handle Ebola? Ban flights from Black countries. How do you stop unwanted immigration? Build a wall with Mexico. How do you stop terrorism? Ban Muslims. How do you reduce the trade deficit or fight a pandemic? Blame China. It was no accident that the targets of these attacks were almost always people of color. In Trump’s worldview, people of color were nearly always the villains, and white Americans were nearly always the victims.
It was a convenient interpretation of history that allowed Trump’s mostly white audiences to ignore their ancestors’—and their own—contributions to the problems they purportedly sought to fix. By attacking President Obama, they could avoid explaining why every American president before him had been white and male in a country where white men made up only about 29 percent of the population. By demonizing the failure of Black countries in West Africa, they could ignore the long history of white European plunder that robbed the continent of its resources and left the people of Africa under the boot of faraway imperial rule. By vilifying undocumented immigrants, they could disregard the American imperialism that destabilized Latin American countries and overthrew democratically elected leaders to install puppet regimes to benefit US corporate interests and Cold War politics. And by focusing on Islamic terrorism, they could absolve themselves of culpability for their own government’s decades-long role in propping up ruthless dictators in the Middle East, like the Shah of Iran, whose brutal rule enabled the Islamic revolution that followed.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) campaign theme reminded his supporters of a mythical, unspecified time in the past when America was thought to be strong and respected and seemingly unconcerned about the negative impact of its actions in the world. He was not visibly troubled by the blatant hypocrisy of the MAGA message, having spent his own career outsourcing American jobs. Trump deployed the theme like a cudgel to attack his opponents. MAGA represented a time when white men could build empires on the backs of Black and brown bodies and when white male dominance seemed impervious to critique or challenge. Trump never explained exactly when he thought America had been great in the past. If there was a particular year or time period he had in mind, he never said. This was part of the marketing genius of the MAGA slogan. The ambiguity of the phrase gave the candidate plausible deniability of what the words actually meant. In much the same way the Southern strategy allowed post–civil rights era Republicans to connect with disaffected white voters, the MAGA slogan enabled Trump to signal his synergy with white voters who were worried or resentful about what they perceived to be their diminishing social dominance over the country.
Trump’s audacious lack of specificity regarding his campaign slogan left the country free to speculate about what he really meant. For those who shared Trump’s beliefs, they were free to envision some imaginary time out of intolerant 1970s television hero Archie Bunker’s theme song, when “girls were girls and men were men” and mediocre white guys “had it made.” But for those who did not picture themselves in Trump’s vision, returning to the past was a scary prospect. Did he want to return to the time when the land was stolen from Indigenous people? Or the time when African Americans were enslaved and deprived of basic freedom? Could it have been the years when women were not allowed to vote? Or when Japanese Americans were locked up in internment camps? Did he want to return to Jim Crow when public schools segregated water fountains and classrooms by race? Or to the time when LGBTQ Americans could be arrested for the “crime” of sodomy? For those who were not cisgender, heterosexual white men, the thought of making America “great again” by going back to virtually any time in the past almost certainly meant returning to a time when they were treated as second-class citizens in their own country.
What exactly did “MAGA” mean to Trump? “This will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in September 2016. “You’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote, and once that all happens you can forget it.” It was a call to arms for white nationalism.
After all the evidence, there were still people who required more proof of Trump’s bigotry. A few weeks before the 2016 election, speculation turned to the possibility that Trump’s former TV producer, Mark Burnett, was sitting on incriminating video evidence that would finally prove Trump’s racism. The speculation was fueled by the release of the Access Hollywood audio, in which Trump bragged that “when you’re a star… you can do anything,” including grabbing women by their private parts. The Access Hollywood scandal resurrected questions about other tapes that might have existed, including the possibility that The Apprentice creator Burnett could have video of Trump using the N-word. Some activists and writers called for Burnett to release the tapes, and Burnett responded that he could not do so, but this discussion wasted time and obscured a critical point: it did not matter. Even if Trump had been caught on tape using the N-word, his supporters would have found a way to deny, excuse, or explain his behavior, just as they had done time and time again when Trump had been caught in embarrassing scandals. As Trump famously told his supporters in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” By October 2016, his racist history had been well documented. The N-word was not the issue. His actions already spoke as loudly as any of his words ever could. With everything we already knew about Trump, why was it necessary for anyone to produce a tape to prove his racism? And why would we turn our attention to the existence or nonexistence of such a tape when there was already so much damning and compelling evidence in front of us?
What was most infuriating during this time was watching knowledgeable white political commentators assure the public that white voters had actually been attracted to Trump because of something called “economic anxiety.” It was not really racism that led them to support Trump; they were concerned about their own economic well-being.
Almost every Black pers
on I encountered knew better. We remembered the ways in which white supremacy had shrouded itself in the robes of economic apprehension since the days of slavery and segregation, and we knew such facile explanations conveniently excused and ignored a long history in which white Americans repeatedly made decisions against their own economic interests in order to perpetuate anti-Black racism. After all, we were suffering too. In fact, we were suffering worse. Our unemployment rate remained persistently higher than white unemployment rates throughout the Great Recession of 2007–2009, and we were more likely to lose our homes and our savings during that crisis. We knew what Trump meant when he said, “Make America Great Again,” we knew we weren’t included in this vision of America, and we knew exactly why this appealed to white voters. It was not a disconnect between the modern Democratic Party and working-class voters. The vast majority of African American voters were working-class Americans, and they consistently supported Democrats. The disconnect was not about class; it was about race. It was about white voters who worried that they were losing their status in a rapidly changing world.
Much of the available data and research confirmed what Black Americans had been saying. A 2016 survey from Public Policy Polling found that 70 percent of Trump supporters in the South Carolina primary wanted to fly the Confederate flag. A June 2017 survey by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Trump’s margin of support was about twice as high with voters with “excellent or good” job opportunities in their communities as in communities where the job opportunities were not good. Another study that year from researchers Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel found “little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump” but did find that “Trump accelerated a realignment in the electorate around racism.” A similar 2017 study by Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found that, aside from questions of political partisanship, “fears about immigrants and cultural displacement were more powerful factors than economic concerns in predicting support for Trump among white working-class voters.” And an April 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Trump voters were driven more by fear of loss of their own status in society than by economic anxiety. “It would be a mistake for people to understand the 2016 election as resulting from the frustration of those left behind economically,” University of Pennsylvania professor Diana C. Mutz wrote in the study.
As for the estimated 6.7 million to 9.2 million Obama voters who reportedly switched to Trump in 2016, according to election analyst Geoffrey Skelley, it’s not clear that they were motivated by economic factors either. “Vote switching was more associated with racial and immigration attitudes than economic factors,” according to a study by Tyler T. Reny of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); Loren Collingwood of University of California, Riverside; and Ali Valenzuela of Princeton. The researchers also found that vote switching “occurred among both working-class and non-working-class whites.”
I don’t know any Black person who is not in academia or politics who read any of those studies. But almost every Black person I know intuitively understood the reality. Donald Trump was tapping into deep-seated fears in America and resurrecting demons that had been hidden for half a century. “He calls for a civil war,” I warned on CNN in 2019. “He didn’t call for a civil war,” National Review editor Rich Lowry quickly responded from across the table. What Trump actually did was to retweet a post from one of his supporters that removing him from office “will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation.” I called it a reckless, irresponsible threat. But Lowry laughed at me on television, claiming it was just “a bad tweet.” It was one of the many times over the course of four years when Black people who warned about the corrosive effects of Trump’s rhetoric would be ridiculed by dismissive white commentators who tried to minimize the president’s audacious misconduct in office.
Every Black person I know understood the threat. We saw it when a white Ohio fireman boasted that he would rescue a dog from a burning building before saving a Black person because “one dog is more important than a million niggers.” We saw it when a white former city commissioner in Georgia complained that he “lived next to nigger town” while speaking at a public city meeting to push for Confederate History Month. We saw it when a white man in Reno, Nevada, attacked a bilingual Latino man as a “fucking spic” and told him to “learn how to fucking speak English” because “you live in America.” We saw it when a white man called a Black man “a fucking nigger” at a protest in the still Black city of New Orleans. We saw it when a chest-thumping white man in Texas yelled “Donald Trump will stop you” to an Arab family on a public beach. We saw it when the Proud Boys marched through the streets of American cities flashing white-power signs. We saw it when white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia. We saw it in Detroit and Kenosha and Portland. We saw it in Minneapolis, Louisville, and New York. We saw it with our own eyes in dozens of American cities in every region of the country. And we saw it because nearly all of these incidents were recorded on video, demonstrating the audacity of Trump-era bigotry. Donald Trump did not invent racism in America, but he clearly emboldened racists and bigots to express themselves publicly in a way that America had not witnessed in decades.
When Cesar Sayoc reportedly sent deadly pipe bombs to CNN in 2018, video emerged of Sayoc at a Trump rally in Florida in which participants chanted “CNN sucks!” When Travis Reinking was arrested for killing four people at a Waffle House in Nashville in 2018, authorities revealed that he had previously been arrested for trying to enter the White House because he wanted to meet Trump. When Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Paul Hasson was arrested on federal weapons charges in 2019 after developing a hit list of prominent Democrats to kill, prosecutors announced that they found searches on his computer for “civil war if Trump impeached.” When Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested and charged with killing two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, video emerged of him in the front row of a Trump rally. When Adam Fox was arrested in 2020 and charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Washington Post analysis found that Fox and at least five others involved in his plot had previously taken part in an April 2020 antilockdown occupation of the Michigan State Capitol to protest COVID restrictions after Trump had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Even as far away as New Zealand, when Brenton Tarrant allegedly killed more than fifty people at a mosque in 2019, a manifesto believed to belong to him was discovered, calling Donald Trump “a symbol of renewed white identity.” Violent political extremists had always existed on the left and the right, but Trump was the first American president in modern history to encourage and incite them.
Of course, Trump never admitted he was a racist. He didn’t have to. When he spoke about Frederick Douglass during a Black History Month event at the White House, he demonstrated a willful ignorance of the very history the month was designed to recognize. When he visited Andrew Jackson’s slave plantation to pay tribute to the nation’s first Democratic president, he abandoned the legacy of the party of Lincoln. When he blamed “both sides” for the racial division in Charlottesville, he promoted a false equivalence between racists and antiracists. When he condemned professional football players who kneeled in protest against police brutality, he prioritized empty gestures of compulsory patriotism over the lost lives of African Americans. When he targeted women of color in Congress and told them to “go back” to where he thought they came from, he trafficked in one of the oldest racist tropes in white supremacy. When he attacked the predominantly Black city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” he reinforced racist stereotypes of Black communities that he, himself, had promoted as a candidate. And when he released his “1776 Report” on Martin Luther King Day in 2021, in response to the groundbreaking New York Times 1619 Project, he communicated his contempt for Black history by telling us not to criticize slave owners for their hypocrisy because t
hat will “damage our civic unity and social fabric.” Time and time again, even as he boasted about a falling Black unemployment rate that he had, in fact, inherited from his Black predecessor, the president of the United States expressed his disdain for the concerns of African Americans.
What appeared to motivate Trump more than all else was a repudiation and attempted erasure of the nation’s first Black president. This may explain his eagerness to sign the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill similar to a Democratic proposal during the Obama administration that Republicans had blocked. “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this,” Trump falsely claimed when he signed an executive action on police misconduct, ignoring the Obama Justice Department’s fifteen consent decrees with law enforcement agencies. But whenever Trump was challenged on his obsession with Obama or his racist actions, he responded with the most predictable racist rejoinder of all: “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body,” he tweeted in July 2019, reflecting a disturbing lack of self-awareness. It is inconceivable that any white man in America—especially one who had been born into privilege in a segregated country and made no effort to change it—could live for more than seventy years in this nation without absorbing at least a fragment of the racist pollution inherent in society. Any mentality that fails to acknowledge this basic reality is, itself, a form of racism, for it promotes an easy denial and diminution of the impact of racism instead of the careful analysis required to understand its lingering effects.
At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that Trump did enjoy the support of a tiny but vocal coterie of small-time pastors, reality TV villains, and washed-up actors and sports figures who happened to be Black. For the most part, they were people with little or no credibility in Black intellectual thought in the African American community, but he paraded them around as shields as though they were the direct descendants of Dr. King’s legacy. After publishing a photograph of Trump with real Black heroes Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali, conservative commentator Kyle Olson argued that “if Trump was a racist, there’s no way he would have posed for a photo with those two.” Such a low bar of acceptance fundamentally misunderstands the nature of racism.