The Donald Trump who won the presidency on Tuesday
is the Donald Trump who demanded execution for five boys, wrongly
accused of a crime. He is the Trump who ran on a platform of “law and
order.” The age of Trump will be an age in which police can act with
impunity. And as an officer of color, he knew, perhaps better than
anyone, that it’s people who look like us—who are brown and black—who
will face the brunt of that impunity.
Pundits
and observers will attribute Trump’s win to “populism” or his
“anti-elite” message. This is nonsense. Trump ran for president as a
nationalist fighter for white America. He promised to deport Hispanic
immigrants. He promised to ban Muslims from the United States. He
refused to acknowledge Barack Obama’s legitimacy, casting him—until the
end—as a kind of usurper of rightful authority. When faced with the
fetid swamps of white reaction—of white supremacists and white
nationalists and anti-Semites—he winked, and they cheered in response.
And for good reason.
More than anything,
Trump promises a restoration of white authority. After eight years of a
black president—after eight years in which cosmopolitan America asserted
its power and its influence, eight years in which women leaned in and
blacks declared that their lives mattered—millions of white Americans
said enough. They had their fill of this world and wanted the old one
back. And although it’s tempting to treat this as a function of some
colorblind anti-elitism, that cannot explain the unity of white voters
in this election. Trump didn’t just win working-class whites—he won the
college-educated and the affluent. He even won young whites. Seventeen
months after he announced his candidacy, millions of white Americans
flocked to the ballot box to put Trump into the White House. And they
did so as a white herrenvolk, racialized and radicalized by Trump.
Or as the Rude Pundit put it so eloquently, Trump voters are shit.
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