A Desperate Trump Is Stirring Up Race Hatred

Remember “economic anxiety”? It was the central concept of an all-too-representative Democratic effort to explain the mass movement behind Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. At the time, liberal commentators scoffed at the idea that Trump supporters were motivated by economic policy issues like trade and globalization. What really mattered to MAGA believers in this overconfident diagnosis was pure racial hatred; the supposed economic concerns fueling the Trump phenomenon were really just a fig leaf for a resurgence of white supremacist resentment on the right.

Of course, things weren’t that simple, as Brian Beutler, who had pioneered the ironic online use of “economic anxiety” to highlight the racial animus of MAGA insurrectionists, admitted:

Trump’s racism explains why he enjoys virtually no support from poor minorities, but, in an era of stagnant wages and high inequality, it does not necessarily fully explain his appeal. Even if, as I suspect, his stated empathy for the white working class is purely affected, some white workers believe it to be sincere and support him for it…. Liberals should be interested in improving economic conditions for everyone, even the most loathsome racists in the Trump coalition, but if we overinterpret the role of racism in supporting Trump, and then find that 40 percent of Americans support him, we will draw inaccurate conclusions about the extent of racial discord in our society, and our propensity to work in tandem with chastised Republicans to uplift inferior whites will begin to diminish.

Certainly, Trump’s strong performance among key non-white constituencies in the 2024 election confirmed the broad outlines of this argument. He nearly doubled his support among African American voters during his 2020 campaign; Asian voters supported him by a 40 percent majority, and he nearly won a majority of Hispanic votes – a record no other Republican presidential candidate has managed to achieve. Economic anxiety was undoubtedly the dominant theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign; he hammered home the scourge of inflation under President Joe Biden, even as he continued to tout an aggressive new mass deportation regime, demonize immigrants, and denounce the “left-wing madness” of DEI policies and critical race theory. This time, in other words, Trump has succeeded in exploiting the zero-sum race-versus-class theory of liberal punditocracy to his advantage, and inventing an appeal to many of the constituencies he has often dismissed in his outbursts at sectarian rallies, based on his promises to usher in a new “golden age” of unprecedented mass prosperity.

Still, there’s a big problem when the premise of this pitch implodes on contact, as we’re seeing now. Trump runs a sluggish and sluggish economy, with energy and food costs continuing to rise. ADP’s employment figures — the only reliable measure of employment since the Trump White House used this fall’s government shutdown as an alibi to stop releasing employment numbers — showed an overall decline of 32,000 private-sector jobs in November as small businesses shed 120,000 jobs, continuing a trend of significant losses in four of the past six months. And Trump’s numbers on the issue of rising prices — his main campaign theme — are toxic, with two in three respondents saying the president has done more to raise prices than to lower them.

So, as Trump becomes increasingly desperate to reverse his free fall in public approval, we are witnessing a striking, though far from surprising, reversal of the old “economic anxiety”: In an effort to distract Americans from the economic anxiety he is responsible for generating, Trump is eager to sow more racial hatred across the MAGSphere.

This reflex is of course never far from Trump’s lizard brain; he made his first foray into political debate by purchasing full-page ads in New York newspapers demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty in order to execute black and Hispanic defendants since exonerated in the Central Park joggers case. And even in the midst of his 2024 attack on the failures of Bidenomics, Trump found ample time to reinforce false racist claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets. Yet the deluge of bad economic news for the White House has prompted Trump to unleash his hate-infested identity on any non-white target that crosses his overloaded brain. In response to the shooting of two National Guard soldiers near the White House by an Afghan immigrant, Trump announced a halt to the processing of immigrants from all “third world countries” — a sweeping racist attribution of one group’s responsibility for the shooting that has since metastasized into a 30-country travel ban and a cruel and disastrous halt to asylum decisions.

And during a televised cabinet meeting this week, Trump launched a series of ugly attacks on Somali immigrants, calling them “trash,” then began insulting them with well-worn anti-Black stereotypes:

These are people who just complain. They complain and where they come from, they have received nothing. When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but smear, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix this.

In the authoritarian, supine messaging complex of the MAGA movement, this was a barely coded cry of “Everyone in the pool!” for the vast group of racist demagogues who support Trump. This message was delivered in real time by reliable current MAGA Vice President JD Vance, who “banged the table in encouragement,” according to The New York Times“Editing from the end of the Klan-Rally meeting. (Trump, visibly satisfied with this kind of response, followed up on Wednesday with an equally grotesque anti-Somali diatribe.)

Trump’s shy, normalizing Gray Lady was prompted to observe: “Even for a president who has frequently made disparaging comments about immigrants, the diatribes against Somalis were an alarming use of White House vulgarity against an entire community.” »

I’m afraid I have some bad news for the Paper of Record regarding the rest of the MAGSphere. If you turn to the right-wing media coverage of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s deadly attacks on ships accused, without evidence, of transporting drugs to the United States – either fentanyl or cocaine, according to the MAGA spokesperson stoking the two minutes of hatred in question – you will find the same vicious racist smears, but in more explicit terms. Megyn Kelly, a lawyer and self-described Christian, announced on her Sirius

I really not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I would really like to see them suffer…I would like to see Trump and Hegseth make it last a long time for them to lose a limb and bleed a little bit.

Like I’m having a really hard time mustering sympathy for these guys who, 10 seconds earlier, almost got taken out by the initial bombshell. But because they managed to get ejected, you know, a little too early, they had to be put in the water.

Nor is it much of a shock to the odious Kelly, who rose to prominence in prime time on Fox News for touting sinister and baseless conspiracy theories about the New Black Panther Party and fervently insisting on Santa’s Caucasian bona fides – effectively rationalizing the network’s demented coverage of the bogus “War on Christmas” into fodder for a race war. Yet like Trump’s Somali outburst, Kelly’s performance was a repulsive attempt to take MAGA’s brand of racial hatreds to 11, in the absence of any plausible agenda to alleviate the economic anxieties of American workers.

We can expect a constant torrent of this obscene and inhumane posturing from a Trumpified Republican Party that is otherwise incapable of governing effectively or bringing tangible material gains to its working class supporters. To take yet another concrete example from this week’s news, the New York Young Republicans Club is hosting for its annual gala Markus Frohmaier, the deputy leader of the German Alternatives for Germany (AfD) party, which celebrates the country’s Nazi heritage while promoting a draconian set of anti-immigrant policies; a club statement in August contained the Nazified slogan “The AfD above all.” One might think that the New York branch of the Young Republicans network would have been chastened by the fate of its rival, the New York State Republicans, which was forced to disband after a series of leaked group chats showed the affinity the group’s members and leaders professed for Nazism, going so far as to dream of sending their political opponents to the gas chambers. But you would obviously be wrong: anything goes, that’s clear, in a MAGA movement independent of expectations of economic improvement. Economic anxiety must succumb, under the leadership of Trump and Vance, to complete white impunity. volkish Reich.