Donald Trump wants you to believe that the Biden administration is “anti-white,” which is worth examining, because his base thinks America is anti-white.
“I think the laws are very unfair right now, and education is being very unfair, and it’s being stifled. But I don’t think it’s going to be a big problem at all. But if you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white, and that’s a problem,” Trump told a Time magazine reporter for a cover story published this week.
Wow, Time still exists, and still publishes.
Did not know that.
Reality fact-check here for Sleepy Donald: 71 percent of the U.S. population is white.
Meaning, he wants you to believe that the 71 percent is somehow being oppressed.
Um, no.
What Trump and his MAGA voters view as being “bias against white” is, in actuality, “trying to make things fair for the other 29 percent.”
DEI, for instance, the acronym for diversity, equity, inclusion, is an effort to get more people of color, more women, more LGBTQ+, into corporate boardrooms, into elected government and government bureaucracy, into K-12 schools, colleges, universities in teaching and leadership positions.
It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but Trump is playing to a sentiment among white cultural conservatives that they’re losing something, and to be fair, they are losing something – generations of advantages stemming from bias toward white hetero males.
The trickle-down here is curious to me.
The great bulk of Trump’s supporters would never be asked to serve on a corporate board or compete for a CEO job, be denied a middle-manager- or higher-level job in a bureaucracy, miss out on an opportunity to be a teacher, professor or administrator in a public school or in higher education.
And their working-class jobs aren’t threatened; we don’t have enough people to fill all the open working-class jobs as it is.
Wonder why Republicans like to moan about immigration, but don’t actually want to do anything to stop it?
Republicans own businesses that use immigrant labor to keep wages down.
This is the biggest issue for 90 percent of MAGA voters, not DEI, but anyway.
I’m reminded here of how Southern political and business elites skillfully played the divide-and-conquer game to remain in power after losing Civil War by getting white voters to think black sharecroppers and porters were a bigger economic threat to them than right-to-work laws that allowed the elites to keep wages down for both the white voters and the black sharecroppers and porters.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?
It’s against this backdrop that Trump can say Black Lives Matter is a “symbol of hate,” and respond to the white supremacist-led race riot in Charlottesville in 2017 by pointing to the “very fine people on both sides,” and his MAGAs don’t bat an eye at the obvious contradictions.
They don’t know any better, because the conservative media ecosystem has them hoodwinked into thinking that liberals are the enemy, when their enemy is the party whose policies keep them in low-wage, low-benefit, long-hours jobs.
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Chris Graham
