The First White President
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent essay, “Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?” is an update to his 2017 piece, “The First White President.” These are long pieces, but well worth the read. As he points out, Trump won every category of white people in the 2016 election: male, female; young, old; all economic levels; all geographic areas. Coates also notes that Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to that of Romney in 2012. This explodes the myth that Trump’s rise was the result of a resentful white working class angry at elite snobs laughing at them. Race is inextricably part of the identity of the Republican Party; part of the unholy Devil’s Deal that has bound together the interests of economic plutocrats with white populism for at least the last 50 years.
Of course, many-if-not-most white Republicans would deny race had anything to do with it. There are a lot of them on my Facebook. Their arguments, they claim, are about Liberals and how dangerous progressive ideas are to the ideals of America. But when you listen to the subtext of what they are saying, that they are losing “their” America, it’s impossible not to unpack that claim from the questions of what exactly is being lost and to whom: people of color. Coded language, dog whistles, is used but it inevitably comes back to a question of race. The entire conceit of MAGA — Make America Great Again — begs the question of…
