Other racists celebrated as well. At a gathering in Washington, D.C., Richard Spencer, leader of the white supremacist alt-right movement, declared: "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" He was speaking to a crowd of nearly 200, many of whom responded with Nazi salutes. You won't be surprised to know that they expressed no confusion about what Trump represented.
"Stand Back and Stand By"
In August 2017, within months of being in office, the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, produced a clear opportunity for Trump to denounce racists, Neo-Nazis, and Klansmen who marched to the chants of "White lives matter" and "Jews will not replace us." Instead, unlike nearly every other elected official on the national scene, Democrat or Republican, he flubbed his response. After a press conference or two, where he equivocated and went off-script to wax admiringly about "very fine people on both sides," he ultimately denounced the far-right racists. However, he pointedly agreed with their demand that generated the march in the first place -- their objection to the removal of the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a city park. Trump has decried the dismantling of Lee statues on a number of occasions, including in Charlottesville, where he called it "sad" and "so foolish."
In 2020, after four years in office, he arguably received even stronger and more violent support from his far-right and white nationalist backers. Those years included his anti-(that is, non-white) immigrant fight to "build the wall" on the U.S.-Mexican border, his rejection of immigrants from the "shithole countries" of the global South, the aspersions he cast on Black-dominated cities, and his endless racist statements about Black athletes, elected officials, women, and protesters.
Then, of course, during the 2020 election campaign, far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Boys, and others -- many with openly racist members in their ranks -- rallied around Trump and became his frontline soldiers after he lost. He famously told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by," but not to stand down. They showed up at most "Stop the Steal" events and were front and center during the January 6th insurrection, where Black police officers reported being called the "n-word." Trump now refers to that same crew as "warriors" and "patriots," ignoring the Confederate flags, anti-Semitic symbols, racial slurs, and nooses that were ubiquitous that day.
In 2020, some in the racist community were smarter in signaling their support for Trump without formally endorsing him. David Duke, however, once again unabashedly came out for him, while suggesting that disgraced media propagandist and ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson be added to the ticket as his vice-presidential choice. Carlson seemed like a particularly sensible possibility to Duke because, even while at Fox, he had been a proponent of the "white replacement theory," the argument that undocumented (and even documented) immigrants of color are part of a larger conspiracy by unidentified liberals and Democrats to supplant white Americans and white American culture with something distinctly (and all too literally) darker and more disturbing. Of course, Trump subscribed to that thesis as well.
The "Anti-White-Feeling" Former President
In 2024, there is little doubt who the nation's racists will once again be backing for president. Only recently, Trump spewed lies and misrepresentations at a -- yes! -- white-dominated gathering in an obscure Black church in Detroit, while denouncing that city as "hell" and "totally corrupt," and describing black communities as dangerous and depressed. He did not, however, repeat for that crowd and representatives of the national media present that day his pledge to address so-called anti-white racism or to make it a priority should he become president again. As he said in a Time magazine interview, "If you look right now, there's absolutely a bias against white (people) and that's a problem." He offered no examples of that "problem," but it fit in squarely with the belief of 58% of his supporters that "racial minorities" are favored over whites in the United States.
Trump also claims that he is a victim of anti-white racism from "radical vicious, racist prosecutors" in Georgia, New York, and Washington, D.C. They are going after him, he insists, simply because he's a white man and not because he committed any actual crimes.
Trump will undoubtedly continue to claim again and again, all too disingenuously, that "I don't have a racist bone in my body," but the folks who unabashedly support him to the hilt certainly think otherwise. The Trump campaign faces the awkward and inconvenient truth that he has never lost the full-scale support of the nation's most hardcore racists.
And no wonder! No matter how often he pretends to be free of bigotry, his racist worldview manifests itself at every turn. In his recent "debate" with President Joe Biden, Trump made his usual hateful statements against immigrants (of color) and added that they are "taking black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They're taking black jobs and they're taking Hispanic jobs and you haven't seen it yet, but you're going to see something that's going to be the worst in our history."
By "black jobs" and "Hispanic jobs," of course, he was referring to his belief that only certain kinds of work define those communities. It should be taken for granted that he wasn't referring to engineers, lawyers, office managers, professors, veterinarians, or any positions of a professional or middle-class nature. He sees Black Americans and Latinos as nothing but the lowest-paid, lowest-status workers in America.
In fact, Trump never has anything genuinely positive to say about the Black community, which he sees -- just to start down a list -- as crime-ridden, dirty, and rodent-infested. Nor does he ever identify any of the groups or individuals in such communities who are working on solutions to the issues they face. That doesn't fit the view of the former president and many of his followers that communities of color are linked only to dysfunction, decay, and (implicitly) inferiority.
Naturally, Trump was wrong on all counts. First, there is no evidence (and, of course, Trump didn't present any) that immigrants are taking jobs from Black and Latino Americans. As the Washington Post noted, "The Black unemployment rate remains near historic lows and wage gains are at all-time highs." In fact, the lowest Black employment on record occurred under President Biden when, in April 2023, it fell to 4.8%.
In addition, unlike Trump's implication that Black people only occupy low-level manual labor jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost half of all African Americans work in professional, management, or office jobs. That would undoubtedly be a revelation to Trump, since in the dozens of businesses he's started, very few Blacks and Latinos are ever found in high-level or professional positions.
Rather than let Trump get away with his endless series of canards on race in America, interviewers should ask him some pointed questions that are simply never asked in Trump-friendly or Trump-fearful media venues. Three come to mind: Why do you continue to receive such wholehearted support from avowed racists? What is the "anti-white racism" (or "anti-white feeling") that you so often talk about and why do you consider it more of an issue than racial discrimination against communities of color? Why should Black voters in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, among other places, vote for someone who spent weeks after the 2020 election desperately attempting to disqualify their votes?
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