Author and journalist Jared Yates Sexton grew up in rural Indiana and has a pretty good idea of how Donald Trump rose to power, his August 2017 book The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a solid account of the rise of the "deplorables" who, as Sexton reminds us this week at the Daily Beast, have always been with us.
My experiences on the 2016 campaign trail were pretty standard before I went to my first Donald Trump rally. Like others, I’d considered Trump to be a sideshow that would run its course before the field narrowed to more serious competitors. And, like others, I’d heard his speeches that ran around the clock on cable news and was certain someone expressing such vulgar and offensive ideas didn’t stand a chance of winning the office.
I was wrong.
Trump maintained his momentum in the polls largely because of his offensive statements. People like my family loved that he called Mexicans rapists, that he said African Americans are “living in hell,” that, at my first Trump rally, he rolled out his plan to ban Muslim immigrants. Here was a man who spoke their language. Here was a man who lived in their world.
For too long they’d been manipulated by a Republican Party that played on their worst fears but never intended to give them power. They’d voted out of fear for decades. Fear of African Americans. Fear of immigrants. Fear of the world changing. They supported Republicans even though, in their guts, they never trusted them. The GOP was the party of wealth, and many of them, like my family, had been raised to be suspicious of Republicans altogether.
Now, Donald Trump wasn’t just placating them, he was one of them. He said the things they said, believed the things they believed. His “tough talk” and “straight shooter” delivery sounded a lot like the racist and misogynistic conversations taking place at my family’s dinner table.
As a result, Trump dominated the Republican primary while his rallies turned into mobile safe spaces for people to be as ugly and offensive as they wanted. Inside those rallies, Trump’s faithful were free to spout racial slurs, demean anyone they disagreed with, and call for political opponents to be locked up or hung. I heard them shout “hang Hillary,” or talk about Clinton being stood in front of a firing squad, some of them saying they’d like to fire the last shot or miming the pulling of a trigger. In other rallies, as the media ran stories detailing Trump’s scandals, they discussed how good it would feel to torture and ultimately murder journalists they believed to be traitors.
Meanwhile, the alt right, a group of white supremacists hiding behind the new, cleaned-up moniker of “white nationalists,” were gaining power and influence. In Cleveland, at the Republican National Convention, I saw rising stars of the alt-right flaunt their newfound stardom among the Republican faithful. They held packed events, partied until dawn, and toasted the death of the old guard.
My family bought in big. In addition to Trump signs and hats, they were on social media posting more racist memes, articles from Breitbart, the home of the alt-right, that regurgitated racist ideology. When Steve Bannon came on the campaign and leashed Donald Trump to teleprompters and his speeches, my family was absolutely hooked. The rhetoric he pushed, the soft appeal of white nationalism, was what they had been looking for, what they had been spouting, their entire lives.
Having grown up in small town NC and now living in Kentucky, I know the people Sexton is talking about. Donald Trump won in large part because he Made Racism Okay Again. And even if he resigned tomorrow, the tens of millions who voted for him will expect their America to continue down this path of generational backlash against electing a black president.
And as Sexton says, these folks will always be with us. Up until now we've been largely able to keep them out of power. That has failed. There's a reason why Trump's domestic policy is "reverse everything Obama did and erase him from the history books". It's what he wants, it's what Sexton's racist relatives want, it's what they voted for Trump to do, and he's doing it.
Somehow, people are still surprised by all this. And should America survive Trump, we'll have to deal with his voters too. They will not go quietly either, not now. It's going to be brutal, ugly, and bloody, and I don't think people are anywhere near prepared for what it will take to get things back to some semblance of pre-Trump normalcy.
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