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To understand the rise of Donald Trump, you don’t need to go to a diner in the Midwest or read “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance’s memoir.
You just need to know these basic facts:
In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.
Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.
While the Census Bureau says there are still 195 million white people in America and that they are still the majority, the white population actually declined slightly in 2023, and experts believe that they will become a minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.
Every component of the Trump-Republican agenda flows from these demographic fears.
The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America was never about economic anxiety, as too many political reporters claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign.
It was, and still is, about race and racism.
The mainstream press has been afraid to say this directly and succinctly. Political pundits keep looking for other causes; after Trump’s upset win in 2016, they thought that “Hillbilly Elegy” was the answer. I read the book in its entirety — something I doubt most campaign reporters can claim — and it offers nothing about Trump or the economic anxieties in the American heartland that supposedly led to Trump’s election. It’s a personal memoir about his dysfunctional family, and the closest thing Vance gets to a political message comes when he writes that his relatives screwed up their lives on their own and have no one else to blame.
But the political press somehow concluded that the book’s narrative unlocked the key to understanding Trump voters, and the ambitious Vance, now Trump’s running mate, didn’t bother to correct them.
The press hasn’t done any better in the years since. It has now failed to adequately cover Trump for three straight presidential campaigns.
It is Trump’s shamelessness about his racism that appeals to white people.
The simple truth is that Trump is a racist, and it is his shamelessness about his racism that appeals to white people. He says what they wish they could get away with saying. They forgive his criminal behavior, his lies, his egomaniacal behavior, and his other flaws because of his racism, not in spite of it. They don’t care that his economic policies will benefit billionaires and not them, just so long as he makes sure minorities have it worse than them. Vance followed up “Hillbilly Elegy,” his supposed paean to the working class, by becoming a puppet of right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled his Senate campaign in Ohio. Trump no doubt chose Vance to be his running mate at least in part to get more money from billionaires for his campaign.
The evidence of Trump’s racism is so overwhelming that the press and many voters now seem to consider it old news, shrugging at his constant stream of bigoted comments. That is exactly what Trump is counting on; it’s difficult to remember that his racism was still considered shocking as recently as 2016 when he ran for president.
Trump has been a racist his whole life; the Justice Department sued him for racial discrimination in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he took out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five — Black and Latino men falsely accused in a New York City rape case — and he has stubbornly refused to apologize to the exonerated men.
He first gained prominence as a political figure for being an obsessive “birther,” propagating false conspiracy claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus couldn’t legally be president.
Trump remains obsessed with race and is constantly looking for ways to discredit and dehumanize any and all minorities: African Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, Muslims, Asians. He’s claimed that Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists, that Obama was the founder of ISIS, that Covid-19 was the “kung flu,” that migrants crossing the southern border have been released from mental institutions and are coming to take “Black jobs,” that Haitians probably have AIDS.
When Trump first emerged as a presidential contender, many Republican Party leaders claimed they were disgusted by his blatant racism.
Now they embrace it.
Dominated by Trump, the Republican Party adheres to policies designed both to maintain white political power and increase the white percentage of the nation’s population.
Once you understand that it is all about white power — especially white male power — the Trump-Republican agenda begins to make sense.
The right-wing obsession over racial demographics becomes obvious in the “pro-natalism” movement, which advocates for conservatives to have more children to take control of society. The mission of the movement is “to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy,” according to a fascinating recent story in Politico.
For the right wing, pro-natalism means looking for every possible means to increase the white percentage of the nation’s population. Through this lens, it’s not hard to see why Republicans remain virulently anti-immigration and strictly opposed to abortion.
Those two issues may appear unrelated, but in fact Republican positions on both stem at least in part from white demographic fears. Republicans want to halt the rise in the nonwhite population by curbing immigration. At the same time, they hope their abortion bans will boost domestic birth rates — staving off white demographic decline. They also want to ban contraceptives and no-fault divorce, forcing women to stay in marriages and have more children.
The Republican Party’s white nationalism is often justified in religious terms, since much of this agenda designed to enhance white power stems from the party’s Christian fundamentalist base. Along with Protestant evangelicals, the Republican religious base now includes fundamentalist Catholics, who stridently oppose abortion.
Fundamentalist Catholicism has started to attract young conservative activists, politicians, and influencers, who seem to searching for a faith steeped in tradition and hierarchy.
Converting to Catholicism has thus become a culture war flex for well-off American conservatives; it is not a coincidence that Vance converted in 2019, just as he was also in the process of converting from being anti-Trump into a Trump lackey. In April, right-wing influencer Candace Owens became one of the latest extremely online conservatives to convert. Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society and the man widely credited for turning the Supreme Court into a conservative bastion, is now focused on creating new right-wing Catholic organizations to deepen right-wing power in the American Catholic Church while expanding his culture war reach.
Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalist Catholics share a common right-wing political agenda, and both groups have aided the rise of Christian nationalism, a movement driven by opposition to any separation of church and state. Christian nationalists call for a return to a Judeo-Christian America, code for a return to a nation in which Christian whites held all the power. The most prominent Christian Nationalist in politics today is Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, who has said that the idea that the Constitution calls for a separation of church and state is a “misnomer.”
Christian nationalism and white power also help explain the confounding nature of current Republican foreign policy. Many Republicans today oppose U.S. military aid to Ukraine but strongly support military aid to Israel.
To understand that policy mashup requires an understanding of the beliefs of Christian nationalists. They consider Vladimir Putin to be a fundamentalist Christian, a guardian of traditional white values, largely because he has cracked down on LGBTQ+ rights in Russia. By contrast, they associate Ukraine with Western Europe, which they think is too woke. Andrew Torba, founder of the far-right site Gab who wrote a self-published book called “Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Disciplining Nations,” said after the Russia’s invasion that “Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular western globalist empire.” Nick Fuentes, another online Christian nationalist, said on Telegram after the Russian invasion that “I wish Putin was president of America.”
Meanwhile, Christian nationalists believe the Bible demands that they embrace Israel. They see it as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that Israel must exist as a precondition to the second coming of Jesus. Such biblically-based support among Christian nationalists means that the Republican Party will support Israel no matter what actions it takes in Gaza.
Increasingly, the Trump–Republican Party has become explicit in its embrace of policies designed to expand white power and appease white nationalists. In fact, several of the right-wing authors of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for a second Trump term filled with extremist proposals, have white supremacist backgrounds and writings. Trump has tried to disown Project 2025, but its authors include former Trump administration officials. Whether Trump officially endorses Project 2025 or not, it remains a good barometer of the white nationalist hold on the Republican Party.