President Trump’s corruption is unequaled by any previous resident of the White House. If anything, his narcissism ranks higher than his corruption. Just look at the Kennedy Center or the East Wing of the White House or Trump’s proposed triumphal arch.
Today, though, I want to look at another destructive aspect of Trump’s ascendancy: what he has done to the nation’s ability to deal with an issue that has plagued the United States since its founding and even before — race.
Trump has not only halted the agonizingly slow accommodation of conservative whites to a multiracial nation, he has also legitimated and exacerbated the most toxic attitudes toward race and immigration held by Republican voters.
In the process, he has turned the party of Abraham Lincoln — founded in 1854 to oppose the expansion of slavery westward — into the home of those high in racial resentment, xenophobia and hostility to marginalized ethnic and religious minorities.
This reactionary process did not start with Trump, but he has made it the centerpiece of both his first and second terms.
At the same time, a growing number of studies are showing that Democrats and liberals have responded to Trump’s dominant role in American politics by becoming noticeably less prejudiced and more open to diversity and growing minority populations.
In “Did Donald Trump’s Presidency Reshape Americans’ Prejudices?” Benjamin C. Ruisch and Melissa J. Ferguson, psychology professors, respectively, at the University of Kent and Yale, reported results of a survey of 1,000 American participants before Trump’s 2016 election followed by a poll of the same participants after the election:
People in Donald Trump’s political base, on average, became increasingly willing to declare their disdain toward minoritized ethnic, religious and cultural groups, both foreign groups and their fellow Americans. Following Trump’s election and during his presidency, Trump supporters on average increased in their expressed prejudice toward Muslims, immigrants and African Americans.
The opposite took place among non-Trump voters:
Progressives, and even conservatives and Republicans who did not support Trump, remained stable in — and in some cases decreased — their expressions of prejudice over this same time period. Critically, we replicated this pattern of results with over 7,700 Americans from a nationally representative sample.
The surveys did not answer the crucial question of “whether people’s authentic views had changed, or just their willingness to express those views.”
Further research, however, suggested “that these attitude shifts went beyond straightforward explicit expressions of prejudice,” revealing “an increase in ‘implicit bias’ (i.e., attitudes assessed indirectly, which are largely spontaneous and hard to control) toward Black people that corresponded precisely to Trump’s early candidacy.”
Ashley Jardina, a professor of leadership and public policy at the University of Virginia, and Trent Ollerenshaw, now a political scientist at Penn State, described a similar pattern in their 2025 paper “White Racial Polarization Before and After the Election of Donald Trump”: “Unlike his predecessors from the period of time after the modern -civil rights era, Trump’s campaign rhetoric was littered with overtly xenophobic and racist statements — a strategy that politicians had long thought was likely to backfire on a national stage in an era in the era after the civil rights movement in which norms of racial equality were thought to be well established.”
Instead, Jardina and Ollerenshaw wrote, “Trump’s race-baiting strategy was profoundly consequential.”
The authors explain how
Trump not only successfully attracted support from many racially hostile white Americans, but how he also, with the support of the Republican Party, catalyzed an unprecedented transformation of white partisans’ views on matters of race and immigration over the course of his presidency.
By 2016, they wrote in an earlier draft,
the changing demographics of the country, the election of the nation’s first Black president, the increased national salience of issues of race and immigration, the significant homogeneity of the Republican Party, and national party leaders’ efforts to avoid confronting or pandering to racial hostility stoked the fires of white grievance and created a representation vacuum for racially conservative whites.
The authors cited two studies, one of which Jardina was part of, that “found that Trump in particular had an outstanding effect on white racial hostility, increasing it among some whites.”
Whites high on the measure of racial resentment provided a clear target for the Trump campaign, but, Jardina and Ollerenshaw pointed out:
Racial resentment only encompasses one element of white grievance politics in the Trump era. One limitation is that the measure is focused on whites’ views about Black Americans, but in today’s more racially and ethnically diverse country, whites’ out-group hostility is likely directed at a broader range of groups. Indeed, a growing number of studies have shown that a wide range of out-group hostilities, including such hostility directed at Muslims and immigrants, were also strongly linked to support for Trump.
More important, research conducted by Jardina revealed another characteristic found in roughly one third of white voters, the possession of conscious “inward feelings of racial identity, consciousness and solidarity.”
Jardina added:
This sense of white racial consciousness is distinct from out-group prejudice: Many white Americans possess a strong sense of racial consciousness without comparatively strong levels of out-group prejudice.
But white racial solidarity is similarly pernicious because it motivates whites to protect the disproportionate power, status and resources of their racial group. In a deeply racially inegalitarian society, such attitudes serve to reinforce the country’s enduring racial hierarchy, even while being psychologically distinct from racial prejudice.
Trump, Jardina wrote in an email, “was both a symptom and a cause. He attracted white voters who were already hostile to Black Americans and hostile to these groups.”
Jardina cited research she and Peter Enns, a political scientist at Cornell, conducted — reflected in “Complicating the Role of White Racial Attitudes and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election” — challenging the assumption that “racial attitudes are fixed early in life and that a candidate like Trump attracts more racially resentful whites and makes those attitudes matter more for vote choice.”
Instead, Jardina wrote by email:
We found that the causal arrow also ran the other way. Among whites who already backed Trump in January 2016, strong opposition to Black Lives Matter grew by about 16 percentage points by August. Those who backed Trump early also became more supportive of building a border wall.
Trump clearly relished raising the heat under this racial cauldron.
I am reluctant to pour cold water on the thesis of my own column, but some caution should be exercised when examining analyses that use racial resentment as a measure or indicator of racist views.
The racial resentment measure is based on agreement or disagreement responses with four core statements, often rendered this way:
Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.
Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class.
It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if Blacks would try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.
Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
A respondent who agrees with the first and third statement and disagrees with the second and fourth is deemed high in racial resentment.
The problem, as critics have pointed out, is that a principled conservative with no or little prejudice might well agree with statements one and three and be classified as high in racial resentment.
As I wrote in a column in 2018, “Riley Carney and Ryan Enos, political scientists at Harvard, have sought to assess the validity of racial resentment questions in their working paper, “Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics: Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern Racism. “In survey experiments, Carney and Enos substituted Lithuanians and other nationalities for African Americans so that the first resentment question would ask for agreement or disagreement with the statement: “Lithuanians should work their way up without any special favors.” Their conclusion: “The results obtained using groups other than blacks are substantively indistinguishable from those measured when blacks are the target group.”
Many of those who study race and politics now agree that racial resentment is a flawed measure, but as far as I can determine, it remains in wide use by scholars who believe it has significant validity, even if it’s imperfect.
A separate analysis that does not depend on the racial resentment scale, a study published in 2020 “The Acceptance and Expression of Prejudice During the Trump Era,” by Brian F. Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, showed, through a series of experiments during and after the 2016 campaign,
that being exposed to Donald Trump’s prejudiced rhetoric causes people to express more prejudice themselves. Notably, this is not merely a “Trump effect”; People’s commitment to anti-prejudice norms is undermined even when exposed to prejudiced rhetoric attributed to unnamed politicians.
These findings are consequential; If politicians increasingly feel at liberty to express explicit prejudice, then the mass public is likely to take cues from such behavior, leading them to express more prejudice themselves.
In 2021, Nicolas M. Anspach, a historian and political science at York College of Pennsylvania, published the results of an intriguing experiment in “Trumping the Equality Norm? Presidential Tweets and Revealed Racial Attitudes.”
Anspach conducted a survey in which subjects were “exposed to one of three tweets made by Trump: a control tweet about the economy, a tweet with an implicitly racist message, or a tweet with an explicitly racist message.”
The result?
Both implicitly and explicitly racist messages interact with racial resentment to increase the propensity to describe African Americans in starkly stereotypical and negative language.
After the 2016 election, at least two studies found that voters’ racial attitudes were more important in predicting their vote than their views of economics. In other words, James Carville’s 1992 “it’s the economy, stupid,” became “it’s race, stupid,” in 2016.
In their 2018 article, “United States: Racial Resentment, Negative Partisanship and Polarization in Trump’s America,” Alan Abramowitz and Jennifer McCoy, political scientists at Emory and Georgia State, respectively, tested “the hypothesis that Trump’s surge among white working-class voters, compared with previous G.O.P. presidential candidates, was due to his explicit appeal to white racial resentment and ethnonationalism.”
Data from the 2016 American National Election Studies survey, Abramowitz and McCoy wrote,
indicate that Donald Trump’s heavy emphasis on racial issues led to a further increase in the strength of this relationship (between racial attitudes and voting), especially among white voters without college degrees.
In terms of shared variance, the relationship between racial resentment and candidate feeling thermometer ratings was about 2.6 times stronger in 2016 than in 2004 among all white voters, but it was more than four times stronger among white working-class voters.
Abramowitz and McCoy used statistical measures “to compare the impact of racial and ethnic resentment with that of economic discontent” and concluded that “after party identification”:
Racial/ethnic resentment was by far the strongest predictor of relative ratings of Trump and Clinton — the higher the score on the racial/ethnic resentment scale, the more favorably white voters rated Trump relative to Clinton. The impact of the racial/ethnic resentment scale was much stronger than that of any of the economic variables included in the analysis, including opinions about free trade deals and economic mobility.
So what’s the bottom line?
Trump is turning the Republican Party into a dumping ground for Americans at their worst. He has nurtured racial hostility, blessed those who voice their disdain of minorities and immigrants and sought, in every way he could, to remake the U.S. government into an instrument of prejudice.
Matthew Tobin contributed research to this article.
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