The short version of this new poll? The modern Republican movement is teeming with xenophobia and outright racism, and Donald Trump's supporters are more racist than even that. Yes, yes, we can all mew and stroke our punditin' chins about the rudeness of saying that out loud, but when you have question after question measuring hostility to non-white Americans and lo and behold, it turns out Republican voters are quite hostile in their feelings toward non-white Americans, you have to do some elaborate gymnastics to dodge the obvious conclusions.
[W]hile 72 percent of Republicans believe that discrimination against whites has become as bad as discrimination against blacks and other minority groups, among Trump supporters the number is 81 percent.
Let's just take a moment to absorb that, rather than letting it slide by as yet another mildly interesting number in the daily news sea of mildly interesting numbers. Four out of five Trump supporters claim that discrimination against white Americans—themselves, in other words—is currently "as bad as discrimination against blacks and other minority groups."
That is delusional. While the success of no small number of politicians hinges on their ability to slather lipstick on that pig, perhaps droning on about how white conservatives just feel so disenfranchised these days, what with having their home appliances packaged with instructions in French and Spanish as well as 'Merican, or having to listen to someone on the sidewalk talking with their family in a language that they can't understand but was clearly only invented for talking smack about th' white folks—spare me. There is no metric by which you can claim white folks are being oppressed for their whiteness in equal measure to black Americans being discriminated against for their blackness, or Muslim Americans for their Muslim-ness, or Latino Americans for not having a good proper name like Smith or Coddington.
It is delusional, and something that can only be said by outright denying that any of those other sorts of discrimination exist. Nobody is marching up and down outside white Christian churches with AR-15s and obscenity-laced cardboard signs. Nobody is appearing on news programs talking about how white Americans today just don't have proper fathering skills. Rifle associations don't hold conventions in which their top leaders warn that white people are unstable, violent, and you'd better damn well arm yourself for the day when the government loses control of them all. Nobody is murdering white churchgoers to incite a supposedly much-needed "race war." When a white American executes a room full of people, there are no pundits demanding we profile white Americans. When government offices close, those closures never appear to disproportionately happen in white neighborhoods. In no American state have police officers ever singled out white Americans for traffic stops and random paperwork checks.
It takes a powerful paranoia to suppose that white America is being oppressed these days. Luckily, powerful paranoia has its own cable channel these days. And its own presidential candidate.
And 74 percent of Republicans say the American way of life should be protected against foreign influence, while 83 percent of Trump supporters say this — including 45 percent who are "completely" in agreement.
This may be a proxy for whether you believe sharia is coming to turn your dog Muslim. Or it may just be raw xenophobia and nothing else. So where do we draw the line here? Is Taco Bell still all right, or too foreign? Pasta? Will we be banning Monty Python reruns and Doctor Who, lest they subvert our children with their rampant Britishness? Foreign influence has been a rather large chunk of the American way of life since the first buckle-headed non-natives rowed ashore and started naming things—if we're going to rename New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Virginia, Georgia and go-down-the-list to rid them of their foreign roots, it's going to be an expensive job. We'll need brand sponsors. Georgia, from now on you'll be known as Pepsi. Get used to it.
Three out of four Republican voters believe discrimination against white people is just as prevalent as discrimination against minorities. Three-quarters believe furriners are making America too furrin, an’ something needs to be done.
This isn't about flippin’ economic insecurity or disillusionment with government functions. This is a great wide fart of racism and xenophobic paranoia, writ in nice big block letters for everyone else to see. When you have 80 percent of an identified group telling you outright that they don't believe discrimination against minorities exists, and that something needs to be done to keep these minorities and their foreign ways from harming the Great White American Culture, they need to get the hell on the clue train.