The MAGA Pitch to People of Color

In his ethnographic account of the culture of Trumplandia, Undertow, journalist Jeff Sharlet notes that most Trump rallies opened with a Black or Hispanic preacher. He describes attending one in Florida, where about two-thirds of attendees comprised various Latino nationalities. While observing a white supremacist gathering to honor Ashlie Babbitt, the Jan 6^th terrorist who was fatally shot as she crawled through a broken window at the Capitol, Sharlet noticed that half those assembled were non-white, as were most of the speakers.

In 2016, 8 percent of Black voters supported Trump. In 2020, that number rose to 12 percent. In May of this year, 17 percent of the African Americans sampled said that if elections were held at that time, they would vote for Trump.

Those shockingly counter-intuitive observations by Sharlet, along with the survey results, seem utterly implausible in light of Trump’s avowed embrace of white supremacy in word and deed. In their efforts to make sense of those developments, some pundits have pointed to the failure of Democrats to pass legislation and implement policies that deliver meaningful change to the lives of non-white US citizens, such as substantive police reform and voting rights protections. Some Black people, in particular, feel like they have worked hard to put Dems in office but are forgotten between elections. And so, the argument goes, they are expressing their bitter disappointment by supporting Republicans.

However true it may be that Democratic politicians have done far too little for their non-white constituents, as an explanation for why some people of color align with MAGA, it is absurd. The thinking would have to be: You Democrats failed to protect us from the party of racist predators. Therefore, we are going to support the party of racist predators. I don’t find that very persuasive.

A different way to understand MAGA’s budding rainbow coalition is as a result of a win-win sales pitch to both white and non-white potential Trump worshipers. By welcoming non-white people into the MAGA cult, white followers can see themselves as non-racist. Despite homicidal rhetoric aimed at non-white immigrants and the delusional racist panic over the “Great Replacement,” some Hispanic and Black citizens are accepting the invitation to join the church of Trump, receive his grace, and enjoy the fiction of Republican “color blindness.” The message to potential cult members of color is: “We’re all the same; you’re just like me.”

This enables blackness and brownness to be erased instead of attacked. It is love conditional on invisibility. While that may sound like an unappealing annihilation of identity, which it is, we have to remember that one of the unexamined privileges of whiteness is rarely having to think about race. If you’re white and pulled over by a cop, it’s no big deal; have your license and registration ready. If you’re black, move and speak very carefully, or you could be taking your final breath within minutes.

MAGA Republicans offer people of color a kind of racial transubstantiation. They are told, in essence, “You can be white if you repudiate your blackness and brownness. You can be a dominator if you deny your history of subordination. Let us give you whiteness by association.” For the moment, at least some voters of color seem to be drinking from that poison chalice.

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Identity Makeovers

Over the centuries, one conservative strategy deployed by powerful and wealthy white people to retain their unearned privileges and undermine forces of egalitarian resistance has been to get whites without wealth to shift their tribal identity from one based on class to one marked by race. In the US, we can date that back to colonial Virginia. From 1676 to 1677, the colonies were rocked by Bacon’s Rebellion, an uprising by an alliance of Anglo-European settlers whose families had only known serfdom and an assortment of free and enslaved Africans. It culminated in torching the elite center of power in Jamestown and forced royal Governor William Berkeley to flee. It was an insurrection that terrified the ruling authorities.

After that, and for the first time, the word “white” appeared as a term denoting race. Along with that was birthed a new and enduring strategy to protect the ruling elite from underclass upstarts. Whiteness became a signifier of racial privilege with the hope it would eclipse the poor white settlers’ lack of economic and political privilege. Now, they could imagine themselves as superior to another group. Of course, that new category of identity, race, also provided the perfect justification for enslaving Africans, not to mention every manner of colonial atrocity in the centuries that followed.

This deliberate divide-and-conquer approach to preventing class rebellion endures to this day and involves what the scholar Martha Bireda calls the “promises of whiteness.” As a white person, you can count on holding a top place in all status hierarchies, having privileged access to social and economic opportunities, wielding power over non-white people, and having a high degree of legal protection, if not impunity, for your actions.

MAGA Republicans are employing a similar ruse to persuade people of color to trade in their ethnic and racial identity for a political and transracial one – the kind of “honorary whiteness” I described above. By joining MAGA, the implied message is that the promises of whiteness can be transferred regardless of color – a status that brings to mind the unofficial “honorary Aryan” designation that Hitler reportedly granted the Japanese in World War II.

To men of color, MAGA offers an analogous proposition: you can transmute racial humiliation into gender domination – trade being a bottom in a world of white supremacy for being a top in a regime of male dominance. Some have eagerly accepted that invitation, such as the Black MAGA Lt. Gov. of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, who, in addition to denying the Holocaust, has come out as an aggressive opponent of female reproductive choice. At the state’s 2021 GOP convention, he insisted that once a woman becomes pregnant, whether through rape or incest, “it’s not [her] body anymore.”

One consequence of accepting the promise of whiteness can be the transformation of others in one’s own group into devalued targets of hatred. This can happen with surprising ease. Unfortunately, there is nothing about being in a subordinate group that guarantees empathy and compassion for those of the same race or ethnicity.

Well-intentioned liberals over the centuries have sometimes attributed a unique nobility to subjugated non-white people. However, white noble savage fantasies are hard to sustain in the face of any close examination of the history of colonialism. Multiple historical accounts make it clear that no group is immune to the seductions of power and privilege. That is especially the case when there are status differences among those who are oppressed.

In Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, she cites the example of free Black planters in French-colonized San Domingue (what would later be Haiti), who held a quarter of the colony’s enslaved Black Africans. They made strenuous efforts to form alliances with white slaveholding plantation owners. Citing their common interests and promising to keep enslaved Blacks in line and prevent rebellions, they hoped to be recognized and respected as equals.

Alas, their “honorary whiteness” turned out to be counterfeit currency. When attempting to cash it in, they were violently rebuffed. One spurned black planter retaliated for the rejection by instigating a rebellion, which was handily defeated. He was publicly tortured to death by being “broken on the wheel,” a gruesome 18^th-century French punishment that featured the fracturing of all the condemned's limbs before being put to death.

The Trauma Bond to MAGA

That grisly example brings into sharp relief one of the more powerful psychological adhesives that can keep white and non-white people alike bonded to the MAGA cult: trauma bonding, a dynamic discussed at length in my new book. It refers to the paradoxical way cult leaders enforce loyalty. Such leaders generate a sense of threat and present themselves as the only ones who can protect members from that danger.

However, the threat is not just something external to the group but also emanates from the leader. Like a mob boss who rules over a gang of subordinates, the leader cultivates an attachment cemented by both fear and love. It is a relationship in which dependency is fused with terror, something we recognize in cases of child abuse, domestic violence, and abductor-hostage situations.

While the MAGA cult will embrace you as a loyal member, any perceived disloyalty will turn your erstwhile comrades into a relentless lynch mob, as we have witnessed repeatedly since Trump’s rise to political prominence. To his flock, he is both a messiah and a menace. His message to potential non-white inductees is, in essence: “You can join us as cherished honorary white people or perish as disloyal people of color. And only by stomping on those below you (immigrants and other targets of MAGA hatred) can the boot be kept off your neck.”

In other words, by aligning with MAGA, a person of color or an individual from an ethnic minority can trade being hated by others for being a hater of others. Rather than being threatened by powerful enemies, one can become the powerful enemy threatening the vulnerable. Instead of being a pleading and humiliated beneficiary of the “mommy state,” one can be a defiant and proud attacker of it. Don’t be the vulnerable African American election worker Ruby Freeman, who was hunted, tormented, and threatened by MAGA terrorists for daring to count votes in Georgia. Instead, be Enrico Tarrio, the Afrocuban leader of the “Western Chauvinist” terrorist group, the Proud Boys – the paradigmatic example of that oxymoronic identity, the white supremacist of color.

Instead of being one of the Asian and Hispanic Americans murdered in a mass shooting at an Allen, Texas mall, one could be the shooter, Mauricio Martinez Garcia, an Hispanic white supremacist hater of minorities, and go out in a blaze of race warrior glory. Instead of being among the Jewish Democratic political candidates who have had to fend off antisemitic attacks from Republicans, one can be Stephen Miller – the Jewish Trump aid, close collaborator with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and architect of his boss’s Himmler-like child abduction policy. The psychoanalytic term for this is identification with the aggressor. – a process of becoming like the perpetrator in order to escape the experience of victimhood.

It is unclear what it would take to break the spell for those vulnerable to induction into MAGA to realize that the promise of whiteness will never be kept. Like the workers Trump has stiffed, the customers he’s conned, the wives he’s betrayed, the students he’s swindled, and the voters he’s defrauded, at some point, MAGA cult members of color may wake up and understand that their fidelity to Dear Leader may not protect them indefinitely. Their “whiteness” could be revoked. And, the merest perception of flagging loyalty could land them in one of Stephen Miller’s planned internment camps, where they would join the ranks of other enemies of the state, such as the immigrants, political opponents, and journalists that Trump and the entire GOP are vowing to punish.