The Limits of Trump’s White Identity Politics
President Donald Trump and his defenders in the conservative media have identified the real group endangered by rising racial tensions during his presidency.
It’s not undocumented immigrants or people of color targeted by his harsh and sometimes openly racist rhetoric. It’s the president and his supporters themselves who are being unfairly accused of racism by critics recoiling from his words.
Democratic accusations of racism are “repulsive rhetoric—the sort of speech intended to marginalize and exile,” insisted the conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt, an inveterate Trump defender, in a column last week. “It is ‘basket of deplorable’ on steroids, and it says to every Trump supporter: ‘You, too, are a white supremacist.’”
The attempt by the president and his allies to invert the debate about his approach to race captures one of the pillars of his reelection message heading into 2020. They have signaled that, as in 2016, he intends to portray his overwhelmingly white, heavily blue-collar, and nonurban coalition as the real victims in American society. And no issue may offer him a more powerful way to gin up those emotions than insisting that the charges of racism against him—and, by extension,
