Julian Bond said race trumps class and gender in mainstream White America. Bond said that at the University of Pittsburgh, way before the 2016 US presidential race began. Bond meant the verb “trump.” He didn’t mean the noun, Donald Trump.
However, Trump’s 2016 campaign for the White House confirmed Bond’s bold charge at Pitt. During the campaign, Trump was exposed making lewd comments about women. Nonetheless, at least 53 percent of the White women who voted on election day voted for Trump.
Trump has a long and well-known track record of ripping-off workers. Nonetheless, blue collar White workers are said to be his most dedicated, loyal, die-hard supporters. But Archie Bunker and Jed Clampett-type White folks didn’t put Trump in the Oval Office by themselves. Trump received over 60 million votes from across the European American political spectrum.
More than just a few White college-educated professionals, White LGBTQ’s and self-professed “progressives” on the amorphous White left were attracted to Trump’s blatant peddling of White racism, and they voted for him.
During his “First 100 Days,” Trump has run loose and lost. He is trying to fight on all fronts at the same time. Even so, his die-hard supporters have stood fast. He has tried to do what they expected and wanted.
If unemployed White coal miners, for example, voted for Trump because they believe he can bring back labor-intensive, high-wage jobs to the coal mines of America, then they are dumb enough to believe he can do the same thing for honey dippers and chimney sweepers. These coal miners are not that dumb. They have never been misled by Trump. They believe in what he believes in.
White American voters put Mississippi’s James Eastland in office, a Trump; Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo was one too; South Carolina’s “Pitch Fork Ben” Tillman was a Trump, long before Donald Trump was; Alaska’s Sarah Palin was a Trump, still is. Ronald Reagan, who the mainstream media once mocked and said was a fringe candidate and would never win the White House, was a stone cold Trump, to name a few. United States politics is littered with White right-wing reactionaries, like Trump, in public office.
The liberal-moderate wing of the U.S. establishment still tries to argue that blatant White racism is—excluding the current Trump interlude—on the fringes of mainstream White America. It is not. It is where it has always been. And that is everywhere.
In contrast, the 2016 overwhelming African American vote against Trump and against right wing reaction, and the steadfast African American opposition to Trump and to right wing reaction since he took office both proclaim, emphatically, the national Black community has absolutely no illusions about where right wing reaction is in the U.S.A.
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