IS DIVERSITY FOR WHITE PEOPLE? ON FEARMONGERING, PICTURE TAKING, AND AVOIDANCE

In December 2015, Donald Trump held a noon rally at an airport hangar in Mesa, Arizona, a largely white suburb in the Phoenix sprawl that had been the spawning ground for the viciously anti-immigrant law S.B. 1070.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, taking a break from defending himself from Department of Justice charges that he had violated a federal court order against racial profiling, kept the stage warm. "You're the patriots," he told the audience. They were the ones worth protecting — with Arpaio's men and guns and jails, and with Trump's grand border wall. The sheriff continued, "One thing about him, I think he'll really do what he says. I really do." The placards that had been distributed read, "The Silent Majority Stands with Trump." In the state of Barry Goldwater, Trump was putting on a display of firepower and nostalgia.

Trump made his grand entrance. His Boeing 757, emblazoned with his name in bold on the side, rolled to a stop in front of the hangar and a crowd of several thousand. From the top of the gangway he waved, then descended the stairs to Twisted Sister's mid-eighties hair-metal hit "We're Not Gonna Take It."

First, he did a live interview with Bill O'Reilly. Large American and Arizonan flags and the enormous crowd served as his backdrop. O'Reilly began questioning Trump almost apologetically, as if recognizing that he had wandered onto hostile turf. When Trump dissed Fox News for "saying untrue things about me" and blustered that he would do "pretty severe stuff" to stop terrorism, the crowd roared.

O'Reilly asked, "Are you gonna tell me tonight on this program that you don't say stuff just to get at the emotion of the voter? I know you do."

"I'm telling you right now that I don't. I do the right thing. I bring up subjects that are important. I bring up illegal immigration," Trump said. "And if I didn't bring it up you wouldn't even be talking about illegal immigration." The crowd started chanting his name.

O'Reilly persisted. "You don't do this to whip up the base, whip up your crowd?"

"I don't, I don't," Trump said. "I say what's right, I say what's on my mind, and that's what's happening."

After the interview he stepped up to the podium to deliver a long speech in his churlish, digressive style, dispensing ample insults to his many enemies. "Somebody said, 'Oh, Trump's a great entertainer.' That's a lot of bullshit, I'll tell you," he said. "We have a message, we have a message, and the message is we don't want to let other people take advantage of us."

In his best seller The Art of the Deal, Trump's advice was to "know your market" and "use your leverage." Trump knew his market. He understood the inchoate white anger cohering in the country well ahead of Republican party leaders and media elites. "Leverage," Trump wrote, "is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can't do without."

In 2011, Obama, who had become for disaffected whites the image of all fears, provided Trump with leverage. Trump made himself the public face of the bizarre Birther movement, which held that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. In naming Obama an "illegal alien," conspiracists could attach fantastical narratives to Obama: Chicago criminal corruption, Muslim takeovers, Mexican drug-dealer invasions.

Despite the fact that Obama had already released a short-form certification of live birth, Trump sent investigators to Hawai'i to uncover what he called "one of the greatest cons in the history of politics and beyond." Obama responded by releasing a long-form version of his birth certificate. Outplayed, Trump still declared victory, saying, "I am so proud of myself because I've accomplished something that nobody else was able to accomplish." He had forced the first Black president to become the first standing president in history forced to defend the legitimacy of his birthright. And he had captured the attention and the affection of frustrated white voters. But at that moment Trump retreated, quietly walking away from a presidential bid. The time had not yet come.

By 2015, though, it had. Whites undone by skyrocketing economic inequality, distrustful of big business and media, ignored by elites — the middle and working class, whose fears of falling were being realized — needed someone to vocalize their anger and anxiety. Trump found ready scapegoats. He called Mexican immigrants "criminals" and "rapists," warned that "Islam hates us," and accused China of "waging economic war against us." He pandered to whites' fragility, played on their glory-days nostalgia. His ham-fisted "Make America Great Again" slogan — so prosaic and dull next to Reagan's "Morning in America" — seemed designed for bro-style fist-pumping, not gauzy restorationist dreaming. As one supporter put it: "Trump is a winner and I'm sick of losing."

His candidacy wreaked havoc on the Republican primaries. The party had become calcified with rules, protocols, etiquette. Trump descended from the air and the airwaves to talk shit. He entertained. He created the vibe that he was a billionaire you could share a hot dog and a can of Coors with, even though deep down you knew he never would. You went to Trump; he never came to you. It created a desire, a longing. And so even as Trump kept an army of fact-checkers well employed — fully 77 percent of the Trump statements that PolitiFact had investigated were rated "Mostly False," "False," or "Pants on Fire!" — the last thing his supporters cared about was the facts. They had feelings, and no one else understood them like Trump did.

One supporter told Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, "The birth certificate stuff, I loved. I watched all the YouTube videos on it, and what he was saying made sense." She added, "I'm dead set [on voting for him] unless I find out something down the line. But I'm not going to believe what the media tells me. I have to hear it from him. The media does not persuade me one bit."

For Trump diehards in a time of danger and disjunction, the media's job was not to challenge, but to affirm. So when demonstrators poured into the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, the media was supposed to confirm for them that those chaos makers were actually supporting the killing of cops, that somehow the Movement for Black Lives was a Black version of the Ku Klux Klan. And some pundits — Hannity, the same O'Reilly who confronted Trump — dutifully filled this role. In their telling, "Black lives matter" was not a call to end state violence against Blacks — and in that way, to end state violence against all — it was evidence of hatred against whites, a premonition of racial...