Trump’s White Identity Politics Appeals to Two Different Groups

Over the past month, President Donald Trump has embarked on a concerted push to place race at the heart of the 2020 election, first by saying that a group of four progressive congresswomen of color should “go back [to] the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and then with a sustained campaign against Representative Elijah Cummings, an African American Democrat. Trump has been using race as a political wedge for nearly a decade, dating back to his campaign against an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan; these moves are, as I have argued, a more explicit version of that long-standing strategy.

Commentators seeking to contextualize this political strategy have sometimes labeled it “white identity politics,” a phrase that mirrors the label (often pejorative) given to politicians who have emphasized race and gender issues. Calling it “white identity politics” also emphasizes the way in which whiteness, though commonly treated as a default or an absence of race, is very much an identity of its own.

But simply labeling Trump’s strategy as white identity politics doesn’t differentiate it from other race-based approaches to politics, much less explain why it works, what its limitations might be, or to whom it appeals.

These are all questions that the explores in a book published earlier this year, aptly titled . (She is a professor at Duke, where I sometimes teach journalism.) Jardina’s research finds that it isn’t just pundits and political scientists who have zeroed in on whiteness as an affirmative political identity: Many white Americans are identifying themselves with their racial group as well. That’s a departure from recent years, though it has likely happened at