Trumpism, Or, Why White People In America Are Angry

I was talking to a German friend of mine recently about politics in America, a familiar conversation you’re used to having as an American in Europe, but what struck me about this conversation was that she told me she’d never been to the States and that now she was afraid of ever going. All she’d seen lately of the U.S. in media and news was police shootings and unbridled violence against black people, so she was convinced that she’d get shot up if she brought her negro nose and Jackson 5 nostrils over.

Let the implications of this sit with you for a second. This is what Europeans think of America. And it’s helping Donald Trump pave his way to the White House.

One of the things that confuses me in the Trump rhetoric is this doozy: “We need to take our country back. We’re going down the wrong path. We need to take our country back.”

It would all make sense if things in America were completely shit and going up in smoke, but they aren’t. So the question is “back” from what? Who is Donald Trump and his followers asking we take our country “back” from?

White people in America are angry, and this is what Donald Trump’s presidential bid is all about. Over the past few years white people have sued universities because they didn’t get in and they have stood behind police officers who have shot or otherwise killed unarmed black people. They have tried to transform a progressive BlackLivesMatter movement to an AllLivesMatter one, and they came for Beyoncé because she made a video about loving her blackness, an artistic gesture that wasn’t even for white people and that still got them hot and bothered.

In Donald Trump they have found a candidate who is outside of the political establishment, sure — a good thing in a politically gridlocked system. But you’re fooling yourself if you think that somehow being outside of the political establishment yet deeply embedded in the business one are two different things with different results, one better than the other.

He speaks to white anger — an irrational anger and fear that brown people and minorities are winning. Donald Trump is the reverse racism candidate, the ideal spokesperson for the white people who have said something negative in the comments about race on a blog or website, for all those who think white people are somehow at a disadvantage.

Trump supporters want to give America back to “normal” people, plain and simple. Enough with the minorities already.

Under a President Trump, like climate change, racism, sexism and other types of bigotry don’t exist, even though science and the deterioration of the planet are proof enough. It’s all a figment of the liberal media’s overactive imagination, something that can’t exist because we all matter and should judge each other by the content of our character not the color of our skin.

(Note the sarcasm.)

What many white Trump supporters do want to get rid of, what they are really very angry about, is political correctness, the irony being that political correctness nearly always has to do with calling out and putting an end to bigotry.

You need look no further than Trump’s own rallies to see how the spaces are engineered for white people, with brown people and queers being immediately targeted as protesters and hurled out, usually with a fight. On Friday, March 11, Trump cancelled a rally in Chicago over security concerns. Rachel Maddow, at MSNBC, has done an excellent job of showing how Trump’s “beat ’em up” rhetoric has led to and encouraged violence against minorities at his rallies. And to think: this is the person the Republican Party is about to nominate as its top dog.

I’m not going to be alarmed or surprised if Donald Trump is elected President in 2017. If ever a civil war was coming, it would be then.