The people who love Donald Trump have no secret agendas. They express their hatreds openly. Their intentions could not be clearer. Those whom they hate defines them. Their aspirations are nakedly eliminationist. They wish to live free from contact with or influence of those whom they hate.
Eliminationism has always occupied a niche in the American political landscape. But Trump and his signature message have piled on the fuel and leaned hard on the bellows, to inflame America’s racist, misogynistic homophobes, into a white hot problem for our national politics.
The politics of elimination — embodied in nativism, white supremacism, and similar authoritarian ideologies -have long been part of the American political fabric, but in recent years have come bubbling forward in the wave of hate-crime incidents associated with the 2016 election, as well as mass killings such as those in Charleston, S.C., and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Historically fueled by dehumanizing rhetoric and belief systems, eliminationism has become a common theme in rising right-wing ideologies around the globe, spread especially through the phenomenon of online radicalization, both among Islamist radicals and alt-right white nationalists
White male voters who aren’t college educated really love Trump a lot, +29. They are an estimated 22% of the electorate —
Even without the gender filter, Trump’s support remains +13 among non-college white voters.
These voters abound in America’s vast rural environs and are easily found in myriad suburbs. They abide in neighborhoods where the faces they see are reliably pale; if English is spoken with an accent, it’s a twang or drawl. Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant ranting offers these voters one of Trump’s most popular features, even though it’s a bug for the rest of us. They are the nativists who like English only laws, they are white separatists who prefer to live in segregated neighborhoods, they are alt-right online rabble rousers, they are homophobes who claim the right to exclude LGBTQ people from their business life, they are the superstitious boobs who believe God is a slot machine and science is a con game, they are those who approve of the rabid antiabortion crusaders who want to cry havoc. Altogether they are a minority of American voters, but nevertheless a significant political coalition, a political axis of evil, or, if you will, the modern GOP.
If Trump’s evil coalition remade America to their liking, AKA “great again”, people of color and women would occupy places more like those subservient roles to which America relegated them from the founding of the Republic until Suffragettes and the Civil Rights Movement kick started generations of incremental improvements in the status of women and minorities that still remains far from sufficient, much less complete. Gender nonconformance would be penalized. Voting would be restricted to as few people as possible. Immigrants without legal status would be deported. Barriers to immigration would rise. America would turn our back on the World’s refugees, often families fleeing turmoil for which the USA bears some responsibility. Reproductive freedom would largely vanish. Domestic violence laws would be relaxed.
Trump and the evil coalition supporting him have already taken unprecedented steps to eliminate political opposition to Trump for the 2020 GOP nomination. Trump used the State of the Union to condemn both investigation and resistance, i.e legislative oversight and political opposition. This suggests that, in months to come, Trump will accelerate his creative destruction of the institution of the Presidency, pushing for even deeper divisions among Americans.
‘Til the 2020 Election date,
Expect worse and harsher treatment,
Of the people that Trump lovers love to hate,
And would very much like to eliminate,
If we don’t get Trump first with impeachment.