Trump’s America being destroyed by its own racism

Donald Trump’s return to power isn’t a political revival, it’s the inevitable consequence of a nation consumed by the very racism it refuses to confront, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

ON THE DAY that U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to ban all immigration from third-world countries – code for non-White countries – it is time the whole world called a spade a spade: Trump’s movement is using White supremacist racial resentment and hatred to deliver political and economic power to benefit the billionaire class.

Every action, every word, everything Trump’s Administration and his supporters do and say should be seen through this prism and called out as such. Anyone failing to do this is helping to normalise and perpetuate the spread of racism, bigotry and hatred. It is not controversial to call out racism; it is controversial to be racist. The world seems to have forgotten this.

Let’s not forget that Trump rose to power on the back of the birther movement; his political career is premised on racist lies about former President Barack Obama.

Trump’s birther movement attacks on Obama were not just a political opponent undermining his opponent. It was not just a publicity stunt, an attention-grabbing strategy, a way to get his name in the news (although shamefully, it was a great strategy for achieving that).

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It’s time to be frank about what happened here. Trump alleged Obama is not a legitimate American to soothe the fears of insecure White Americans who watched as record numbers of voters came out to support America’s first Black president twice, heralding a new America where multiculturalism and diversity were not only normal but accepted and celebrated.

The symbolism of Obama’s presidency – the reality that a Black president could build a large enough multicultural and economically diverse constituency to win two elections – terrified insecure White people.

It’s time we talked openly and honestly about where these White insecurities and fears come from because it is the only way we will adequately understand and come to grips with how someone who is blatantly corrupt, cruel, intellectually inept, incompetent, deranged, unfit, a felon, a sexual deviant, friends with a paedophile, who has literally taken a wrecking ball to the White House, who was a total failure as President in his first term, could possibly be re-elected to a second term and allowed to destroy American institutions and democracy, pushing America into an unstable authoritarian state.

There, I said it. America is being destroyed by its own racism.

Despite racism being so obviously central to Trump’s rise, you will still hear people repeat the old, tired, wrong story that Trump won by promising to solve insecure economic anxieties. This orthodoxy is, shamefully, just an attempt to ignore and downplay racism.

In fact, as my analysis of Trump’s polling shows, it is not economic anxiety that explains Trump’s political support, but rather it is White people defending their racial and sometimes gendered and religious dominance.

Indeed, if it were just economic anxiety that led to Trump’s rise, how does that explain why Trump and Kamala Harris were neck-and-neck with voters on incomes less than $50,000, and equally neck-and-neck with voters over $50,000? It is, of course, not low-income Black people who vote for Trump – 83% of Black voters voted against Trump (including 92% of Black women) – but rather, White, low-income voters.

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Some also like to claim that educational attainment explains Trump’s rise, with 56% of those without college degrees voting for Trump and 56% of those with a college degree voting for Harris.

Yet, there is a stark racial divide amongst those without college degrees. Where 66% of White people without college degrees voted for Trump (who make up 38% of the electorate), 64% of non-White people without college degrees voted for Harris (who make up 18% of the electorate).

What these polling figures actually reveal is that it is not just race or income or education that explain Trump’s support, but rather it is the interplay between them.

In truth, Trump has won the support of the majority of White, non-college-educated, low-income Americans not because he better serves their economic needs and wants, but because these people are White and their education and income status insecurities make them susceptible to fear and resentment of losing their racial privilege.

Bluntly, their racial privilege is, historically, all they have had to make them feel good about themselves, and so they hold onto that privilege – the privilege Trump promises to protect and grow – because they perceive themselves to have no other power to cling to.

Obama terrified their sense of self and Trump has promised to soothe their White supremacist feelings. That is what happened and that is what has destroyed America.

If you needed any more evidence of how central White supremacist hurt feelings are to Trump’s power, consider that 89% of Trump voters claimed their most important issue in the 2024 Election was immigration. This is more than the 81% who named the economy as more important. Ironically, only 18% named democracy as important to them, which is fitting considering their racism is destroying American democracy.

When the truth of the Trump movement is laid out plainly in this way, it becomes clearer why it really does not matter what Trump does — how badly he behaves, how much his agenda serves the billionaire class at the expense of ordinary Americans, how corrupt he is, how much he uses his presidency to enrich himself and his family, how devastating his agenda has been for jobs and the economy. Because as long as he is calming White people’s vulnerable-snowflake-White-supremacist-anxieties, they will support him.

Of course, no Trump voter is ever going to admit this, possibly even to themselves and so America’s descent into Trump’s authoritarian dystopia will continue, even when it continues to hurt the very people who voted for it.