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On August 21, 2015, the conservative writer Ben Domenech wrote an analysis of the Republican presidential primary headlined: ‘Are Republicans for Freedom or White Identity Politics?’ Even at this early date, Domenech saw in the rise of Donald Trump the very real prospect that Trump could reduce the party to the “narrow interests of identity politics for white people.”
Three years later, and after Trump’s improbable victory in the presidential election, Domenech’s fear appears vindicated.
Most will remember the President’s reaction, back in August 2017, to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in which participants attacked counter-protestors and killed one. Rather than condemning the white nationalists he appeared to apportion blame equally: “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides”.
The President created more controversy later that year when he retweeted a British far-right group that was circulating misleading videos purporting to show Muslims engaging in acts of violence. And in August 2018, Trump endorsed a longstanding but false claim pushed by white supremacists that black South Africans were killing white South Africans and taking their farms.
Each of these episodes illustrates Trump’s apparent support for the racially inflected grievances that some whites express. And as our new book on the 2016 presidential election, Identity Crisis, demonstrates, it was this message that helped put Trump in the White House.
Academic research has shown that whites’ political opinions are frequently linked to their views of minorities. For example, whites’ opinions about a range of issues such as civil rights, crime, and social welfare programs are linked to how they view African Americans, and their opinions about anti-terrorism policies are linked to how they view Muslims.
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