“Trumpism” is a politics of racial demagoguery. America in the age of Donald Trump is more permissive of explicit racism than it’s been at any point since the civil rights era. And because bigotries rarely dance alone, the president’s nativism is accompanied by anti-black racism—first seen in his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama—anti-Muslim prejudice, and anti-Semitism.
These ideologies exist on a continuum, with casual prejudice on one end and virulent hatred on the other. But common to every expression is a desire to ostracize, remove, and even eliminate the racialized group. The difference between segregation to isolate black Americans and race riots to remove them is one of degree, not kind. Individual efforts to keep black people out of public space are a soft expression of the same impulse that drives radical calls for a white “ethno-state.”
Seen as part of a continuum, the relationship between bigoted rhetoric and bigoted action becomes clearer. The former can facilitate the latter. A society permissive of rhetorical dehumanization is necessarily more vulnerable to actual dehumanization. Allow racial contempt to spread unchallenged, and racist violence will eventually follow.
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Over the past month, in order to generate support for his political party, the president has tried to generate racial hysteria out of a small “caravan” of migrants headed for the American border, where they will attempt to claim amnesty…
Right-wing media followed suit, taking the president’s claim, amplifying it, and connecting it to a conspiracy theory accusing liberal philanthropist George Soros of orchestrating the “caravan.”…
This message of dangerous hordes and anti-American conspiracies was meant to inspire fear and hatred. And those inclined to fear and hate picked up the message. One of them, who blamed a Jewish refugee organization for bringing “invaders that kill our people,” decided to act, killing 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in the worst anti-Semitic terror attack in American history, part of a surge of anti-Semitic hate crimes since 2016…