A Desperate Trump Is Stirring Up Race Hatred

Remember “economic anxiety”? That was the central concept in an all-too-representative Democratic effort to explain away the mass movement aligning behind Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Back then, the liberal commentariat was mocking the notion that Trump’s supporters were motivated by questions of economic policy like trade and globalization. What really mattered to the MAGA faithful, in this overconfident diagnosis, was pure race hatred; the alleged economic worries fueling the Trump phenomenon were really only a fig leaf for a resurgence of white supremacist rancor on the right.

Of course, things weren’t that simple, as Brian Beutler, who had pioneered the ironic online usage of “economic anxiety” to underline the racial animus of MAGA insurgents, admitted in August 2016:

Trump’s racism explains why he has essentially no support from poor minorities but, at a time of stagnant wages and high inequality, it doesn’t necessarily explain his appeal entirely. Even if, as I suspect, his stated empathy for the white working class is purely affected, some white workers believe it is 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 racism’s role in Trump’s support, 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 inclination to work in tandem with chastened Republicans to lift up downscale whites will start to diminish.

Certainly, Trump’s strong showing among key non-white constituencies in the 2024 election confirmed the broad contours of this argument. He nearly doubled his support among African American voters over his 2020 showing; Asian voters supported him by a 40 percent plurality, and he almost won a majority of the Hispanic vote—a landmark no other GOP presidential candidate has come close to reaching. Economic anxiety was definitely the dominant theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign; he hammered away at the scourge of inflation under Joe Biden’s presidency, even as he continued to tout an aggressive new regime of mass deportation, demonize immigrants, and decry the “left-wing lunacy” of DEI policies and critical race theory. This time, in other words, Trump was able to exploit the zero-sum race-versus-class theorizing of the liberal punditocracy to his advantage, and contrive an appeal to many of the constituencies he often dismissed in his bigoted rally outbursts, based on his promises to usher in a new “golden age” of unprecedented mass prosperity.

Yet there’s a big problem when the premise of that pitch implodes on contact, as we’re now seeing. Trump is presiding over a sluggish, top-heavy economy, with energy and food costs continuing to spike. ADP payroll figures—the only reliable current employment measure since Trump’s White House has used this fall’s government shutdown as an alibi to stop publicizing job numbers—showed an overall decline of 32,000 private-sector jobs in November, with small businesses shedding 120,000 jobs, continuing a trend of significant losses over four of the past six months. And Trump’s numbers on the question of rising prices—his signature campaign issue—are toxic, with 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’re witnessing a striking, if far from surprising, inversion of the old “economic anxiety” saw: in an effort to distract Americans from the economic anxiety he is responsible for generating, Trump is keen to further sow race hatred across the MAGAsphere.

This reflex is of course never far from Trump’s lizard brain; he engineered his first foray into political debate by buying full-page ads in New York newspapers demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty in order to execute the since-exonerated Black and Hispanic defendants in the Central Park jogger case. And even amid his 2024 assault on the failures of Bidenomics, Trump found ample time to boost the false racist claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of their neighbors. Yet the barrage of bad economic news for the White House has spurred Trump to unleash his hate-infested id on any non-white target that flits through his overtaxed brainpan. In response to the shooting of two National Guard troops near the White House by an Afghan immigrant, Trump announced a halt on processing immigrants from all “Third World countries”—a sweeping racist imputation of group responsibility for the shooting that has since metastasized into a 30-country travel ban and a cruel and disastrous cessation of decisions on asylum claims.

And in a televised cabinet meeting this week, Trump let loose a stream of ugly attacks on Somali immigrants, whom he called “garbage,” and then proceeded to insult with well-worn anti-Black stereotypes:

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

In the supine authoritarian messaging complex of the MAGA movement, this was a barely coded cry of “Everybody into the pool!” for Trump’s vast supporting cast of racist demagogues. That message was conveyed in real time by reliable MAGA toady Vice President JD Vance, who “banged the table in encouragement,” per The New York Times’ writeup of the meeting’s Klan-rally finish. (Trump, clearly pleased with this sort of response, followed up with an equally grotesque anti-Somali rant on Wednesday.)

The diffident, Trump-normalizing Gray Lady was provoked to observe, “Even for a president who has frequently made derogatory comments about immigrants, the rant against Somalis was an alarming use of vulgarity from the White House against an entire community.”

I’m afraid I have bad news for the Paper of Record about the rest of the MAGAsphere. If you toggle over to the right’s coverage of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s murderous attacks on boats alleged, without evidence, to be transporting drugs to the United States—either fentanyl or cocaine, depending on which MAGA mouthpiece is whipping up the two-minute hate in question—you’ll find the same vicious race libels, only in more graphic terms. Megyn Kelly, a lawyer and self-professed Christian, announced on her Sirius XM show that she didn’t think Hegseth should be held accountable for the second strike he reportedly ordered on the first of the boats taken out in the administration’s Caribbean campaign—and that, indeed, the two survivors killed in that strike in defiance of the laws of warfare didn’t suffer nearly as much as she wanted them to:

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

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

This is also not much of a shock for the odious Kelly, who came to prime-time prominence on Fox News for touting lurid and baseless conspiracy theories about the New Black Panther Party and fervidly insisting on the caucasian bona fides of Santa Claus—thereby efficiently streamlining the network’s demented coverage of the phony “War on Christmas” into fodder for a race war. Yet, like Trump’s Somali outburst, Kelly’s performance was a repellent bid to dial up MAGA-branded race hatreds to 11, in the absence of any plausible program to alleviate the economic worries of working Americans.

We can expect a steady torrent of this obscene and inhumane posturing from a Trumpified GOP that is otherwise at a loss to govern effectively or deliver tangible material gains to its working-class supporters. To take yet another ready example from this week’s news cycle, the New York Young Republicans Club is hosting for its annual gala Markus Frohmaier, the deputy leader of Germany’s Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD) party, which celebrates the country’s Nazi heritage while promoting a draconian set of anti-immigrant policies; an August communiqué from the club contained the Nazified slogan “AfD über alles.” You might think that the New York City–based arm of the Young Republicans network would have been chastened by the fate of the rival New York State Republicans, which was forced to disband after a series of leaked group chats showcased the affinity that members and leaders of the group professed for Nazism, up to and including fantasies of consigning their political opponents to the gas chambers. But you would, of course, be wrong: Anything goes, it’s clear, in a MAGA movement untethered from expectations of economic improvement. Economic anxiety must succumb, under the direction of Trump and Vance, to the utmost impunity of the white volkisch Reich.