MAGA, Trump, and the Status Claims of Racial Views

• In Event: Trumpism, Christian Nationalism, and Rightwing Revanchism

Abstract

The racial touchstones of Donald Trump candidacy, Presidency, and reelection campaign are familiar to many of us. From calling Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, referring to white supremacists as “very fine people,” labelling to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” to the dog whistle of protecting suburban voters from low-income housing, Trump’s political communication was routinely grounded in racialized narratives. And while the use of race, ethnicity, and immigration have a sordid history in American political culture, white nationalism has entered mainstream conservative politics to a degree not seen since the Jim Crow era (Clark, 2020).

In my five months volunteering for the Trump 2020 reelection campaign in the rust belt of Northeastern Pennsylvania, race was an ever-present topic among the people who moved through the campaign. Whether in discussions of Black Lives Matter protests, the murder of George Floyd, or statements by and about President Trump, it was rare to have a conversation with participants that did not include some amount of race talk. But while themes of racial stereotypes, deservedness, and resentment were present in conversations about Black Americans, these were not the only way that people talked about race. I was instead surprised to note that almost everyone would bring up race though a strong claim that Trump and/or themselves were not racist, typically as a non sequitur. They were not ignorant of both historic and contemporary racial injustice and would routinely incriminate political opponents as the perpetrators of this inequity. Far from a taboo topic, discussions of race and racism formed an important part of their overall worldview, and many offered complex views that attempted to make sense of racial inequity while protecting their positions from accusations of racism.

To explore this racial discourse, I draw on five months of ethnographic research of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Rather than a group of individual voters engaged in an electoral campaign, the people I spent time with could be better described as participants in a social movement, what I call the MAGA movement (Koenig & Mendelberg, ND). Analytically, taking a movement perspective on an electoral campaign shifts our attention away from questions of party identification or individual vote choice to discursive themes of collective identity and solidaristic action (Taylor 2013, Koenig 2022). From this perspective I ask, how did MAGA participants make sense of race in America? Of racial conflict and racial inequity? Of prejudice and group difference? Of the concept of racism itself? Some of what I experienced, such as claims of reverse racism or group stereotyping, is nothing new the racial discourse of the US. But other parts, and the way they were assembled, point to a novel status discourse that blended race with themes of partisanship, conspiracism, and populism.

In this paper I illustrate how the racial discourse of the Trump world was more complex than the racial resentment and the colorblind racism of stereotyping expressed by participants. Instead, a core aspect of the discourse was a seemingly inclusive approach to race, one that explicitly aimed both to argue that supporters were not racist and to incorporate Black and Latino citizens into the category of “hard working Americans.” And rather than attribute all racial inequity to individual failings, it also included a vociferous structural argument that explained racial inequity via the corrupt workings of the elite—those Democrats, “Republicans in Name Only” (RINOs), and the wealthy who were seen as part of a decades long struggle that not only aimed to subjugate everyday Americans under tyrannical rule, but had already captured many Black Americans in nets of poverty and policy designed to keep them subservient. And where the twin strategies of the elite were understood to unjustly frame Trump supporters as racist while concurrently striving to keep white and Black Americans from working together, Trump was seen as the catalyst that could defeat these elites and heal the wounds of the country.

In practice, this racial discourse allowed MAGA participants to hold seemingly inconsistent views, where racial judgements were both individual and collective, caused by Black people themselves but also by elites. As I will argue, the outcome is that it enabled the MAGA world to make sense of and draw on the lives and experiences of Black Americans in a variety of ways: (1) it structured the understanding of racial inequity such that racial stereotypes could continue to exist; (2) it allowed participants to recognize this inequity, often within structural and historical accounts, while absolving themselves and their fellow participants from blame; (3) in laying the blame at the elite, it provided racial ammunition to fuel the status narrative of MAGA populism; and in doing so it (4) built an emotional and political bridge between the oppression of the “righteous people” and the historical struggles of Black America.

Author

• Biko Koenig, Franklin & Marshall College