Trump's Big CON: I Will Save the Oppressed White Majority

UPDATE V:  "The Trump administration is preparing to have the Justice Department’s civil rights division investigate and possibly sue universities over affirmative action programs that the administration believes discriminate against white people.

This initiative fits a pattern. Since his inauguration, Trump has been hard to pin down on many issues — for example, he demanded the repeal of Obamacare and then called the House Republican health-care bill “mean” — but he has remained steadfast on one thing: his particular brand of identity politics.

And now, with this new initiative, he is once again addressing, and perhaps stoking, the grievances of the white voters who are integral to his base of support.

A sense of victimhood among whites was ascendant even before Trump’s candidacy. As sociologist Arlie Hochschild documented in her extensive conversations with rural whites in Louisiana, there was a pervasive sense that the beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants and refugees were 'stealing their place in line,' cutting ahead 'at the expense of white men and their wives.' In Hochschild’s phrase, these people felt like 'strangers in their own land.'

This sentiment showed up in polls as well. In 2011-2012, 38 percent of Republicans thought that there was at least a moderate amount of discrimination against whites, according to American National Election Study surveys. That figure jumped to 47 percent in the ANES study in January 2016. Similarly, an October 2015 Public Religion Research Institute poll found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans thought that 'discrimination against whites has become as big of a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.'

These views were crucial to Trump’s rise."

Read the Washington Post, Resentful white people propelled Trump to the White House — and he is rewarding their loyalty, which includes a graph which "illustrates this, and, to my mind, it is crucial to understanding Trump’s rise. It shows that Trump did only a little bit better among Republicans concerned about losing their job compared to those with no such concern, as measured in January 2016 YouGov polls. But he did much better among those who thought whites were losing jobs to minorities":

UPDATE IV:  "The Justice Department’s plan to investigate and sue universities over affirmative action admissions policies they determine discriminate against white students represents a shift in the department’s civil rights division. But the move also addresses a central concern for voters who fueled President Trump’s victory last year: that whites are losing out in today’s society."

Read the Washington Post, Discrimination against whites was a core concern of Trump’s base.

UPDATE III: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s internal announcement indicating that the Justice Department is seeking to curb affirmative action in a university admissions case has roused President Trump’s conservative base by seizing on a longtime grievance of the right at a moment when the administration is struggling to fulfill core Republican promises. . .

For a Republican Party still searching for consensus in the Trump era, Sessions’s moves signal that the administration is embracing the base during a time of turbulence and tension, with heavy attention being paid to the concerns of the white voters who lifted Trump into the presidency."

Read the Washington Post, Sessions’s move to take on affirmative action energizes Trump’s base.

UPDATE II:  "White Americans obtain bachelor's degrees at significantly higher rates than blacks or hispanics. A 2012 Stanford University study found that while whites comprised 60 percent of the nation's graduating high school class in 2004, they accounted for nearly three quarters of admissions to the nation's most selective colleges. At elite schools, wealthy white families have traditionally used donations and legacy admission preferences to tip the scales in favor of their children.

Nevertheless, the Justice Department's move appears to be linked to a widespread belief among white conservatives that so-called "anti-white bias" is a serious problem in society today. Recent polling underscores the point. A Huffington Post/YouGov survey from last fall, for instance, found that Trump voters believe that whites are more discriminated against than Muslims, Blacks, Jews, and Latinos. . .

A 2011 study found that white people believe anti-white bias has worsened over the decades, to the point that they think it's now a more serious problem than bias against blacks. That study opened with a prescient 2009 quote from then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who will oversee the DOJ's bias investigation as Attorney General: 'Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another.'

White Americans' zero-sum framing is not supported by data. Across any number of available metrics -- income, wealth, education, life expectancy, you name it -- white people continue to fare significantly better than their black counterparts. But the Trump administration's move is likely to validate these beliefs, making them strongly and more widely held among Trump's base.

Some progressive groups, like the Century Foundation, have in recent years moved toward supporting income-based affirmative action policies, rather than race-based ones, as a way of defusing the racial tensions around college admissions. A Gallup poll last year found that aside from direct measures of academic achievement (like grades, SAT scores and course selection), economic considerations were the admissions factor most widely-supported by members of the general public. Race-based measures were near the bottom of the list.

A conservative administration less steeped in the ideology of white nationalism might have chosen to tackle college admissions from the angle of economics, promoting income-based admissions criteria that many voters across the political spectrum would have a hard time disagreeing with. Instead, by focusing on perceived anti-white bias the Sessions Justice Department has all but ensured that race and identity will remain at the center of college admissions battles for years to come."

Read the Washington Post, White Trump voters think they face more discrimination than blacks. The Trump administration is listening.

UPDATE: Maybe The Donald is trying to save oppressed white people like 'His Boy Wonder'.

Read ProPublica, The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance into Harvard, by Daniel Golden, who wrote the 2006 book, “The Price of Admission.” The article stated that

"[The] book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision."

"After the 2012 election, the leadership of the Republican Party (including one Reince Priebus) became convinced that in a country that is becoming steadily more diverse, if it didn’t find a way to reach out to minority voters and win at least some of them over, it would be nearly impossible for the party to win the White House again. But then Donald Trump came along, animated by a theory that was just the opposite. Rather than reach out to minorities, the way to win was to run an explicitly white nationalist campaign that used racial resentment as its engine. To the surprise of most people, it worked. And now the Trump administration is looking for ways to show its voters that it’s delivering for them. Charlie Savage reports on a new Justice Department initiative:

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

To many people reading this, the idea that white people are being discriminated against in higher education — or anywhere else — is absurd. The idea that discrimination against whites is such a significant problem that it demands Justice Department action is positively ludicrous. But we should understand that this is exactly the kind of thing many of Trump’s voters wanted him to deliver. . .

Affirmative action is just one particularly resonant part of this puzzle, in which white people are told that any effort to address historical and current discrimination must necessarily involve taking something from white people and giving it to black people, a zero-sum contest in which, if racism is being ameliorated, it must mean whites are being victimized.

This idea goes back a long way, but it’s important to understand that it needs to be constantly maintained, which is where the conservative media come in. If you’re not a regular viewer of Fox News, reader of Breitbart or listener to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, you may not understand what a central role white racial grievance plays in the media presentations that shape how conservatives today see the world. There are constant reminders in those forums that government is an entity that swoops into your life to steal things from you so that it can give them to undeserving black people.

Sometimes it requires wholesale invention of crimes and outrages, but much of the time the conservative media do it by taking something real and jamming it through a racial extruder to come out on the other end as evidence of the cushy life minorities are being granted. For instance, a Federal Communications Commission program that has existed for decades to help low-income people afford telephone service gets turned by the conservative media into “Obamaphones” supposedly given only to black people, once there’s an African American in the White House. . .

And of course, these arguments are joined to a steady diet of stories about how African Americans are dangerous criminals who pose a constant threat to the safety and security of good citizens. For instance, you may think that Black Lives Matter is a movement whose goal is to get police to treat African Americans with the same respect they treat white people (including by not killing them), but if you’re a consumer of right-wing media, you’ve been told a hundred times that BLM is actually an insanely violent quasi-terrorist organization that literally advocates the murder of police officers. You’ve also been told that discrimination against racial minorities is all but nonexistent; the only racism that remains in America is white people being unfairly accused of being racist.

To white people who look around at their communities and see poverty, addiction and lack of economic opportunity, the claims about things such as affirmative action and the smorgasbord of government benefits supposedly available only to minorities are enormously compelling. They take tribal impulses and turn them into an argument about economics and fairness. What’s holding you back, Republicans say, is those people and the special favors they get.

So you can be sure that in the White House, they’re only too happy to have a big controversy about affirmative action. It reinforces the racial allegiance of their core voters, with the happy side effect of diffusing any dissatisfaction that might arise from the fact that their economic policy is geared entirely toward serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful. And if they’re successful in making it harder for African Americans to succeed, well, that’s just icing on the cake."

Read the Washington Post, The Trump administration takes up the cause of oppressed white people.