A Desperate Trump Is Stirring Up Race Hatred

Remember “economic anxiety”? It was a central concept in Democrats' all-too-representative attempt to explain the grassroots movement behind Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. At the time, liberal commentators ridiculed the idea that Trump's supporters were motivated by economic policy issues such as trade and globalization. What really mattered to MAGA devotees about this self-righteous diagnosis was pure racial hatred; The supposed economic problems fueling the Trump phenomenon were in fact just a fig leaf for the resurgence of white supremacist rancor on the right.

Of course, it wasn't that simple, as Brian Beutler, who first ironically used the term “economic anxiety” on the Internet to highlight the racial animosity of the MAGA rebels, entered in August 2016:

Trump's racism explains why he has virtually no support from poor minorities, but at a time of stagnant wages and high inequality, it doesn't necessarily fully explain his appeal. Even if, as I suspect, his stated sympathy for the white working class is purely artificial, some white workers believe it is sincere and support him for it… Liberals should be interested in improving economic conditions for everyone, even the worst racists in the Trump coalition, but if we overestimate the role of racism in support for Trump and then find that 40 percent of Americans support him, we will draw inaccurate conclusions about the extent of racial divisions in our society, and our propensity to work in in tandem with the punished Republicans to raise the level of the white underclass will begin to decline.

Of course, Trump's strong performance among key non-white voters in the 2024 election confirmed the broad contours of this argument. He almost doubled his support among African American voters for his 2020 performance; Asian voters backed him by a 40 percent majority, and he nearly won. majority of Latino votes— a milestone that no other Republican presidential candidate has come close to achieving. Economic anxiety has certainly been a dominant theme of Trump's 2024 campaign; he fought inflation during Joe Biden's presidency even as he continued to tout an aggressive new regime of mass deportation, demonize immigrants, and denounce the “leftist insanity” of DEI policies and critical race theory. In other words, this time Trump was able to take advantage of the zero-sum race-versus-class theory of the liberal panditocracy and craft an appeal to many of the voters he had often rejected in his bigoted rally outbursts, based on his promises to usher in a new “golden age” of unprecedented mass prosperity.

However, a big problem arises when the premise of this proposal breaks down upon contact, as we now see. Trump presides over a sluggish, overburdened economy as energy and food prices continue to rise. ADP payroll data is the only reliable current employment indicator since the Trump White House used the government shutdown this fall as alibi to stop posting job numbers– showed total reduction of 32,000 jobs in the private sector in November, when small businesses lost 120,000 jobs, continuing a trend of significant losses in four of the last six months. And Trump's numbers on rising prices (his signature campaign theme) are toxic. two out of 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 seeing a striking, if far from surprising, inversion of the old concept of “economic anxiety”: in an attempt to distract Americans from the economic anxiety he is responsible for creating, Trump is seeking to further sow racial hatred throughout the MAGA sphere.

This reflex is, of course, always present in Trump's lizard brain; He took his first step into political debate by purchasing full-page advertisements in New York newspapers. demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty to execute exonerated blacks and Latinos in the Central Park jogger case. And even as he attacked the failures of Bidenomics in 2024, Trump found ample time to amplify false racist claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were have pets their neighbors. However, the barrage of bad economic news at the White House prompted Trump to unleash his hate-filled personality on any non-white target that flashed through his overworked brain. In response to the shooting of two National Guard troops near the White House by an Afghan immigrant, Trump announced an end to the processing of immigrants from all…Third world countries— a radical racist accusation that the group was responsible for the shooting that has since metastasized travel ban to 30 countries both cruel and catastrophic cessation of decisions on asylum applications.

And at a televised Cabinet meeting this week, Trump unleashed a torrent of vile attacks on Somali immigrants, whom he called “trash” and then launched into insults using tired anti-black stereotypes:

These are people who do nothing but complain. They complain, but from where they came they got nothing. When they come from hell and complain and do nothing but be a bitch, we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.

In the unconscious authoritarian complex of messages of the MAGA movement, this was a barely coded cry: “Everyone in the pool!” for a huge group of racist demagogues who support Trump. This message was conveyed in real time by MAGA Vice President's trusted sycophant J.D. Vance, who “tapped the table in encouragement,” according to New York Times' review completion of the Clan meeting. (Trump, clearly pleased with this answer, continued equally grotesque anti-Somali remarks on Wednesday.)

The coy, Trump-normalizing Gray Lady was forced to note: “Even for a president who has often made derogatory comments about immigrants, the rant against Somalis was a disturbing use of vulgarity by the White House against an entire community.”

I'm afraid I have bad news for the Gazette about the rest of the MAGAsphere. If you switch to right-wing reporting about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's alleged murderous attacks on boats, without evidencetransport drugs into the United States – or fentanyl or cocaineDepending on which MAGA mouthpiece is inciting the two-minute hate in question, you'll find the same vicious racial slurs, only in more graphic terms. Megyn Kelly, a lawyer and self-proclaimed Christian, said on her Sirius XM show that she doesn't think Hegseth should be held responsible for the second strike he reportedly ordered on the first of the boats withdrawn in the administration's Caribbean campaign – and that, indeed, the two survivors killed in that strike, in violation of the laws of war, were not suffer almost as much as she wanted them to:

I really not only want them to be killed in the water, whether they're on a boat or in the water, but I'd really like to see them suffer… I'd like to see Trump and Hegseth make this last long enough for them to lose a limb and bleed a little.

Like I'm really having a hard time getting sympathy for these guys who were nearly destroyed by the first bomb 10 seconds earlier. But since they managed to eject, you know, too early, they had to be taken out into the water.

It also doesn't come as much of a shock to the controversial Kelly, who has become famous on Fox News Channel's primetime television for promoting dark and unfounded conspiracy theories about the New Black Panther Party and ardently insisting on Caucasian conscientious Santa Claus– thereby effectively turning the internet's frenzied coverage of the fake “War on Christmas” into fodder for a race war. However, like Trump's outburst in Somalia, Kelly's speech was a disgusting attempt to turn MAGA-branded racial hatred up to 11, in the absence of any plausible program to alleviate the economic woes of working Americans.

We can expect a constant stream of these obscene and inhumane statements from a Trumpified Republican Party that will otherwise be unable to govern effectively or bring tangible material benefits to its working-class supporters. Another ready-made example from this week's news cycle: The New York Young Republicans Club is hosting for its annual gala Markus Fromayer, deputy leader of Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which glorifies the country's Nazi legacy while promoting draconian anti-immigrant policies; The club's August communiqué contained the Nazi slogan:AfD about everything” One might think that the New York-based chapter of the Young Republicans network would have been punished by the fate of rival New York State Republicans, who were forced to disband after a series of leaked group chats revealed the closeness that the group's members and leaders espoused to Nazism, even to the point of fantasizing about betraying their political opponents. to gas chambers. But you are, of course, mistaken: it is clear that in the MAGA movement, not associated with expectations of economic improvement, anything is possible. Economic anxiety must succumb, under the leadership of Trump and Vance, to complete white impunity. folk Reich.