Trump’s Power Feeds on White Demographic Fears
Paranoid about losing their majority status and the power it confers, white Americans keep backing Trump’s racist anti-immigrant policies. The post Trump’s Power Feeds on White Demographic Fears appeared first on The Intercept.
GETTYSBURG — This is the most American of towns. It is where Robert E. Lee tried to destroy the nation, where Abraham Lincoln tried to heal it, and where William Faulkner revealed a century later that the country was still irretrievably racist and broken.
Even though much of its bloody Civil War past is hidden behind McDonald’s and Burger King and Dairy Queen and Walmart, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, today is still the symbolic capital of the endless American fight over the nation’s history.
Inevitably, that fight always comes down to race.
And so that means that this is the town that best explains Donald Trump.
Once you understand that Trump’s rise is all about white fears and white power — the same motivations that triggered the Civil War — the Trump agenda begins to make sense.
Gettysburg is where the Confederates invaded the North to make their ultimate bid to protect slavery and white supremacy. Pickett’s Charge, on July 3, 1863, the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, lives on in Southern mythology as the so-called “high tide of the Confederacy,” the closest that Southerners believe they came to winning the Civil War.
But it really wasn’t that close. Pickett’s Charge was a disaster for the Confederates, a bloody massacre of thousands of rebel troops. After Gettysburg, it was just a matter of time before the Confederacy’s ultimate defeat.
Lincoln recognized Gettysburg’s real significance as the beginning of the end and so came here to give his most iconic speech to explain what the war was about. When he said in his Gettysburg Address that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Americans at the time understood what he meant: an oligarchic slavocracy could not be allowed to run the nation.
But after Lee surrendered at Appomattox and the war ended in 1865, there were still millions of white people in the South who refused to accept the death of the slavocracy, while many more of their descendants have never accepted that white people and Black people can truly live as equals.
In his Yoknapatawpha County masterpiece, “Intruder in the Dust,” Faulkner revealed in 1948 what Southern white people really thought about race and American history. If only they could try Pickett’s Charge again:
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old … there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods … it’s all in the balance … we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think this time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory.”
What even Faulkner couldn’t imagine was that white people all across the nation would eventually come to sympathize with and perhaps even share that Confederate fantasy.
It is white hysteria, the same phenomenon that gripped the antebellum South and led to the Civil War, that has fueled the rise of Donald Trump.
The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America has never really been about economic anxiety, as so many pundits have claimed. True, many swing voters, including some minorities, have supported Trump by wrongly thinking that he would be good for the economy. But for Trump’s MAGA base, it has always been about race and racism.
The fact that MAGA voters aren’t motivated by the economy has become clear as Trump has tanked the stock market and threatened a global financial crisis with his crippling tariffs. Trump’s voters, who loudly complained about inflation under the Biden administration, now say they don’t care about the higher prices and financial panic generated by Trump’s tariffs.
Instead of economic angst, MAGA is gripped by a demographic paranoia of the same kind that surged throughout the South in the years just before the Civil War. The antebellum South feared what was to come in 20 years: America’s western expansion would lead to the creation of so many free states that the South would eventually be outnumbered in Congress and lose its power to defend slavery. The Civil War was about the future.
Today, MAGA also fears the future: It fears that America will soon become so diverse that white people will lose their power over politics and society.
Here is the figure that freaks out MAGA the most: In 2025, only about 47 percent of American children under five years old are white.
That one statistic explains MAGA hysteria — and explains much of Trump’s agenda. It explains his draconian anti-immigration and deportation policies and his attempts to end birthright citizenship. It also explains the anti-abortion movement and the right-wing pro-natal movement, both of which represent flailing attempts to increase the white percentage of the population. The racist truth about the right-wing pro-natal movement becomes clear by examining its contradictory positions; many of its leaders are virulently anti-immigration at the same time they say they fear population decline. They only fear white population decline.
As long as Trump demagogues about race and identity and takes actions that his base thinks are designed to curb minority population growth and enhance white power, MAGA will go along with anything else that he wants to do.
Right now, that racial bond between Trump and his base manifests itself through Trump’s draconian anti-immigration policies. Trump and his MAGA base are obsessed with immigrants. Trump has pushed out a frenzied series of anti-immigration orders, including, among many others, the freezing of funding for refugee resettlement and the scrapping of temporary protected status for refugees from Venezuela, the banning of migrant legal aid, detaining and deporting students simply because they were involved in pro-Palestinian protests, and the withdrawal of hundreds of other international student visas with no explanation. Many of his orders, including his attempt to end birthright citizenship, are facing ongoing legal challenges. The only point of Trump’s crude anti-immigration orders is to try to reduce the number of nonwhite people entering the country. That became clear when Trump extended refugee status to white South Africans, who he falsely claimed were being persecuted by the majority-Black South African government.
The consequences of MAGA’s demographic hysteria are similar to what happened in the antebellum South, when Southerners gave up on the idea of being part of the United States.
A sense of existential dread has led to the rise of radical right-wing politics in MAGA, combined with a surge in conspiracy theories that revolve around race and identity. Conspiracy theories once confined to the margins of the internet now flourish, most infamously one that claims that a leftist deep state secretly unleashed a surge in immigration in order to replace America’s white population. There is a parallel with the antebellum South, which was also immersed in conspiracy theories about race and identity: then, conspiracy theories were stoked by Southern fears of slave revolts, of the abolitionist movement, and of Abraham Lincoln.
Today, MAGA’s beliefs have spread so far that even more traditional Republicans have embraced the notion that liberals are seeking to sabotage traditional America. William Barr, who turned against Trump after serving as his attorney general in his first term, still insisted in 2024 that he couldn’t support a Democratic presidential candidate because he believed that a “continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide.”
Trump’s rise has been stoked by his unrelenting use of racist conspiracy theories, beginning with his false claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and highlighted during the 2024 campaign by his lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. His one great political skill has been his shameless willingness to lie to appeal to white people fearful of a diverse future and convert them into his MAGA disciples. While Trump’s MAGA base is not a majority of the country, it is large enough to dominate the Republican Party’s base, which explains why Republican politicians have been so reluctant to speak up against any of Trump’s chaotic actions.
What is most ominous today is that MAGA is now so immersed in conspiracy theories that it has developed a deep hatred of the federal government, much as the South did in the 1850s.
Trump’s followers not only believe that the federal government has been instrumental in their demographic decline, but they also seem convinced that Western-style liberal democracy is no longer the right political system for them. They appear willing to give up on democracy in exchange for a white nationalist autocrat — someone like Donald Trump.
The post Trump’s Power Feeds on White Demographic Fears appeared first on The Intercept.
