The expectation that some whites have for Donald Trump isn’t hard to identify. From overt statements about Mexican judges, building a massive wall, and blocking immigration, to the traditional keywords of Republican candidates—law and order, inner cities, urban problems—when making not-so-oblique references to repressing blacks, Trump has given whites every indication that they are his only constituency.
The whole theme of the Trump campaign is easily to interpret as a call to restore a sort of American Apartheid—Jim Crow 2.0—in which blacks, immigrants, and Jews just better watch it. It’s no wonder that white supremacists are optimistic about a Trump presidency. And it’s also no wonder that Trump’s name has become a mantra for those giving a not so subtle “just you wait.”
The chant erupts in a college auditorium in Washington, as admirers of a conservative internet personality shout down a black protester. It echoes around the gym of a central Iowa high school, as white students taunt the Hispanic fans and players of a rival team. It is hollered by a lone motorcyclist, as he tears out of a Kansas gas station after an argument with a Hispanic man and his Muslim friend.
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Trump’s name has taken the place of traditional racist terms of contempt. It not only contains the weight of derision, but also the strength of a warning. Trump is coming. Then you’ll get yours.
In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Mr. Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans’ public discussion of race.
Breached them, torn them open, and wallowed in the wreckage. Trump is running on a building wave of racism, sucking in the adulation and returning promises of a society saturated in racial bias.
And of course, for many whites the election of Barack Obama was the signal, not of racial unity, but of their slipping authority.
Work by Michael I. Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, suggests that whites have come to see anti-white bias as more prevalent than anti-black bias, and that they think further black progress is coming at their expense. On talk radio and Fox News, complaints about bigotry are routinely dismissed as a mere hustle — blacks “playing the race card” or being racist themselves. And during Mr. Obama’s presidency, whites have increasingly seen his policies as freighted with preference toward blacks, according to data collected by Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine.
That talk on Fox and on AM radio has paved the way for Trump. Anyone shocked at the open racial terms Trump is using has never listened to Michael Savage or Joe Walsh. Conservative voters aren’t shocked by racist language, they expect it. Racism has become as big a part of the right as hatred of government, and in fact, the two are often interchangeable.
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There’s a name for someone who is pushing a program of nationalism, racial and religious purity, strong man control, torture and war crimes, a disdain for human rights, law-and-order as a means of suppressing protest, and a stabbed-in-the-back narrative that insists the nation has been betrayed by those who have forgotten the “real” way things should be.
It’s not a pretty name. But it’s accurate.