Trump delivers words of resistance embraced by resentful whites

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.

TRUMP

TRUMP

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In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald Trump's name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans' public discussion of race.

Trump has attacked Mexicans as criminals. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. He has wondered aloud why the United States is not "letting people in from Europe."

His rallies vibrate with grievances that might otherwise be expressed in private: about "political correctness," about the ranch house down the street overcrowded with day laborers, and about who is really to blame for the death of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. In a country where the wealthiest and most influential citizens are still mostly white, Trump is voicing the bewilderment and anger of whites who do not feel at all powerful or privileged.

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But in doing so, Trump has also opened the door to assertions of white identity and resentment in a way not seen so broadly in American culture in over half a century, according to those who track patterns of racial tension and antagonism in American life.

On campuses clenched by unforgiving debates over language and inclusion, some students embrace Trump as a way of rebelling against the intricate rules surrounding privilege and microaggression, and provoking the keepers of those rules.

Among older whites unsettled by new Spanish-speaking neighbors, or suspicious of the faith claimed by their country's most bitter enemies, his name is a call to arms.

On the internet, Trump is invoked by anonymous followers brandishing stark expressions of hate and anti-Semitism, surprisingly amplified this month when Trump tweeted a graphic depicting Hillary Clinton's face with piles of cash and a six-pointed star that many viewed as a Star of David.

"I think what we really find troubling is the mainstreaming of these really offensive ideas," said Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "It's allowed some of the worst ideas into the public conversation in ways we haven't seen anything like in recent memory."

Trump declined to be interviewed for this article, and his spokesman declined to comment.

Outside a former aircraft factory in Bethpage, New York, not far from a strip of halal butchers and Indian restaurants now known as Little India, a Long Island housewife who gave her name as Kathy Reb explained how she had watched the complexion of her suburb outside New York City change.

"Everyone's sticking together in their groups," she said, "so white people have to, too."

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The resentment among whites feels both old and distinctly of this moment. It is shaped by the reality of demographic change, by a decade and a half of war in the Middle East, and by unease with the newly confident and confrontational activism of young blacks furious over police violence. It is mingled with patriotism, pride, fear and a sense that an America without them at its center is not really America anymore.

In the months since Trump began his campaign, the percentage of Americans who say race relations are worsening has increased, reaching nearly half in an April poll by CBS News. The sharpest rise was among Republicans: Sixty percent said race relations were getting worse.

In making the explicit assertion of white identity and grievance more widespread, Trump has galvanized the otherwise marginal world of avowed white nationalists and self-described "race realists." They hail him as a fellow traveler who has driven millions of white Americans toward an intuitive embrace of their ideals: that race should matter as much to white people as it does to everyone else. He has freed Americans, those activists say, to say what they really believe.

"The discussion that white Americans never want to have is this question of identity — who are we?" said Richard Spencer, 38, a writer and activist whose Montana-based nonprofit is dedicated to "the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent" in the United States. "He is bringing identity politics for white people into the public sphere in a way no one has."

On the flatlands of social media, the border between Trump and white supremacists easily blurs. He has retweeted supportive messages from racist or nationalist Twitter accounts to his 9 million followers. Last fall, he retweeted a graphic with fictitious crime statistics claiming that 81 percent of white homicide victims in 2015 were killed by blacks. (No such statistic was available for 2015 at the time; the actual figure for 2014 was 15 percent, according to the FBI.)

In fact, Trump's Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. When Little Bird, a social media data mining company, analyzed a week of Trump's Twitter activity, it found that almost 30 percent of the accounts Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular self-identified white nationalist accounts.

Trump dismisses those who accuse him of embracing or enabling racism. "I'm the least racist person," he declared in December in an interview with CNN.

Another Republican once sounded alarms about globalization, unchecked immigration and the looming obsolescence of European-American culture. But in two bids for the Republican nomination, that candidate, Patrick J. Buchanan, won a total of four states. Trump won 37.

Buchanan's 1992 and 1996 campaigns were dismissed as a political and intellectual dead end for Republicans.

"I said, 'Look, we're the white party,'" Buchanan said in an interview, recalling his attacks on multiculturalism and immigration. "'If this continues, we're going the way of the Whigs.' Everyone said, 'That's a terrible thing to say.'"

Buchanan was campaigning against a backdrop of white political and cultural dominance in America. But in the years that followed, the number of immigrants living in the United States illegally would double and then triple, before leveling off under the Obama administration around 11 million. Deindustrialization, driven in part by global trade, would devastate the economic fortunes of white men accustomed to making a decent living without a college degree.

"It is the changes that are taking place that have created the national constituency for Donald Trump," Buchanan said.

For many Americans, President Barack Obama's election signaled a transcendent moment in the country's knotty racial history. But for some whites, the election of the country's first black president was also a powerful symbol of their declining pre-eminence in American society.

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. 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.

Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, used polling questions about racial inequality to classify people as either "racial conservatives" or "racial liberals." During Obama's two terms, Tesler found, racial liberals accelerated their migration to the Democratic Party. As the 2016 campaign began, the Republican Party was, to use Tesler's phrase, the party of racial conservatism.

Few politicians were better prepared than Trump to harness these shifts. While open racism against blacks remains among the most powerful taboos in American politics, Americans feel more free expressing worries about illegal immigrants and dislike of Islam, survey research shows. In Trump's hands, the two ideas merged: During Obama's presidency, he has become America's most prominent "birther," loudly questioning Obama's U.S. citizenship and suggesting he could be Muslim.

Trump "is speaking an anti-other message — that Obama's foreign, which is mixed in with being black, and perceptions that he is Muslim," Tesler said. "It is a catchall for expressing ethnocentric opposition to Obama, without saying you're against him because he's black."