The Average White Male is Donald Trump
Let’s stop pretending Donald Trump isn’t normal
We read and hear the same story all of the time. Donald Trump is not a normal President and he is destroying our democracy day by day. Maybe some of that is correct. President Trump continues to embarrass us on the world stage daily. He is incompetent at his job and has no will to improve. I’m not here to defend Trump and what he has done as President. Frankly, he hasn’t done much himself besides defer to Congress and just tweet nonsense, usually contradicting official White House positions.
However, let’s get something straight here. Trump’s views may seem extreme to many Americans but there’s one group who loves what he is doing — white men. The media will dance around the topic but they won’t come out and say it. White males in the United States love Donald Trump and everything he stands for.
Let’s start with the 2016 election. Although Trump lost the popular vote as a whole, it sure wasn’t because of white men who made up 34% of the voting population. Trump won this demographic by a margin of 62–31. Thirty-one points! 62% of white men thought a guy with zero governmental experience who couldn’t answer basic policy questions during debates would be a better choice for President than Hillary Clinton, an accomplished governmental official.
Today, Trump’s approval rating among white men stands at 57%, much higher than the country as a whole, which hovers around 39%. He garners support from six out of ten white men, even after shutting down the government twice, failing to handle natural disasters throughout the country, rolling back civil rights protections in the Department of Justice, and attacking the FBI and many other American institutions. He also ended the DACA program and put thousands of people at risk of deportation after they volunteered to come forward out of the shadows into American life.
Here’s the truth. Most white guys don’t care about anything except the taxes coming out of their check and if there is “illegals” trying to take their job. They don’t care about racial inequalities or equal rights for the LGBT community. They do care if you try to fight for your rights however, especially if you do it by a national anthem protest.
They don’t care about the #MeToo movement and a good chunk of them think it’s complete bullshit. 22% of white men would be much more likely or somewhat more likely to vote for a Senate candidate that was accused of sexual misconduct. It’s no wonder everyone disregarded the numerous allegations against Donald Trump.
Immigration is another “extreme” view of Donald Trump’s that most white men in America share. 65% believe that most or all illegal immigrants should be deported, regardless of circumstances. Some of you may have seen the recent segment on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, where Trump supporters had a chance to meet face-to-face with a DACA family. It was difficult to watch and sure enough, there were two older white men leading the charge against them.
Along with the issue of immigration is the prospect of building a wall on the Mexican border. Although Americans as a whole oppose this idea, white men again have a different take. A slight majority want it built.
We see this time and time again. The mere mention of Colin Kaepernick is sure to cause heads to explode. White men simply don’t believe there is any racial injustice in this country anymore. Frankly, they never have. Even in the 1960’s when civil rights protests were taking place, white people as a whole believed African Americans were awarded the same opportunities as them. Tim Wise explains,
By 1969, a mere year after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., 44 percent of whites told a Newsweek/Gallup Survey (August 19, 1969) that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good paying job — twice as many as said they would have a worse chance. In the same poll, eighty percent of whites said blacks had an equal or better chance for a good education than whites did, while only seventeen percent said they would have a worse opportunity.
In other words, even before the 1970s, whites were already convinced that things were equal, or even that we were the real victims of discrimination, enjoying even less opportunity than African Americans did. That is to say, perceptions of white victimhood were already brewing, within the first few years after the fall of formal white supremacy.
Outside of all of the polling and data to link Trump to the average white male in America is my own experiences. Despite growing up in a fairly diverse area and going to diverse schools, I have still interacted with a lot of white guys whether it was in college, at different jobs, at the bar, or any public place. They’re much closer to the beliefs that Trump holds than the media would lead you to believe. The stories of affirmative action holding them back. The illegal immigrants bankrupting our country. Welfare and food stamp recipients are always stealing their taxes (which are always too high).
Of course, none of these complaints are based in reality. That’s the personification of Donald Trump. He stokes fears by spewing lies that white guys eat up because it reinforces their worldview. Donald Trump is no different than the guy you work next to at the factory or in the office. He just decided to take their warped perspective public.
