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There are few circumstances under which inflation can be comforting. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, one of them appears to be when it serves as an alibi for an electorate’s sharp turn toward meanness, selfishness, and a hard-edged type of identity-centered nationalism.
Many Americans have used inflation to explain away the country’s embrace of radical political change. Yet this ignores basic facts about the U.S. economy. Before the election, I wrote a column highlighting some of these remarkable statistics, noting that the country has recently far outpaced its G-7 peers in economic growth and brought unemployment down to nearly historic lows; that inflation, after briefly surpassing 9 percent in 2022, has plunged to 2.6 percent; and that gasoline prices, one of the most important pocketbook issues for Americans, are relatively low.
There are few circumstances under which inflation can be comforting. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election, one of them appears to be when it serves as an alibi for an electorate’s sharp turn toward meanness, selfishness, and a hard-edged type of identity-centered nationalism.
Many Americans have used inflation to explain away the country’s embrace of radical political change. Yet this ignores basic facts about the U.S. economy. Before the election, I wrote a column highlighting some of these remarkable statistics, noting that the country has recently far outpaced its G-7 peers in economic growth and brought unemployment down to nearly historic lows; that inflation, after briefly surpassing 9 percent in 2022, has plunged to 2.6 percent; and that gasoline prices, one of the most important pocketbook issues for Americans, are relatively low.
Even George F. Will, a dean of conservative columnists in Washington, indirectly laid bare the ridiculousness of this explanation. As he wrote this week, Trump “ran promising to increase living costs” due to the large tariffs he has vowed to impose on imports.
But to fully understand why the inflation explanation doesn’t add up, one must examine the broader nature of Trump’s program—specifically, its retrograde racial politics. After all, Trump was explicit about his policy priorities during the campaign, and the president-elect’s staffing moves and statements since Nov. 5 have reaffirmed his intentions.
Trump has quickly announced a prospective team of hard-liners to execute his priorities on the border and immigration. This includes Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy; Tom Homan as his so-called border czar, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. By all indications, Trump will rely on this team to carry out a sweeping expulsion of millions of undocumented migrants.
Pulling off such a feat would disrupt the economy and everyday life on a scale with few comparisons in U.S. history. Trump’s zealous associates have pledged to carry out workplace raids and suggested deporting whole families to meet their goals. Given the small size of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, accomplishing deportations on this scale would probably require using the National Guard—including by dispatching units from Republican-led states to Democratic-governed ones, a move of dubious legality.
Trump has long devoted himself to laying the groundwork for this. Since his first presidential campaign, he has denounced Mexicans as “rapists,” alleged that countries such as Venezuela have emptied their prisons to inundate the United States with “criminals,” and amplified vile and baseless claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are preying on the community’s pets.
More overtones of white nationalism and nativism can be found in Trump’s infamous 2018 disparagement of what he called “shithole countries,” which in his definition are home to Black and brown people. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, a top Trump ally and now formal advisor to the president-elect, has called for women to have more babies—calls that conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, another prominent Trump backer, has echoed while also casting the issue in explicitly racial terms.
Hinting at a much broader anti-immigration agenda, Trump and his surrogates have also repeatedly inveighed against birthright citizenship, a provision of the U.S. Constitution. Trump’s efforts to call into question who “real” Americans are date back to 2011, when he started saying that he had “real doubts” about Barack Obama’s citizenship and demanded that the then-president produce his birth certificate. Couple this with Trump’s other comments suggesting a preference for immigrants from Nordic countries, and a sense of racial purpose running through many of his fondest projects begins to emerge.
This racial agenda also lurks in the Trump movement’s designs on remaking the country’s education system. In Florida and other states, Trump allies have launched a wholesale attack on books that are frank about the country’s history of slavery and its aftereffects as well as those that discuss gender and sexuality in anything but heteronormative ways.
Meanwhile, Trump couches his hostility toward diversity and inclusion initiatives in higher education as a way to protect the country’s white population from discrimination. In July, for instance, he said, “I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination. And schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity will not only have their endowments taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment. A portion of the seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies—policies that hurt our country so badly.”
Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense appears to have been made in a similar spirit. Hegseth, a veteran Fox News host with no policy background, has made a name for himself attacking diversity efforts in the military, saying that Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be fired for his support of “woke” programs. Trump’s transition team is reportedly considering creating a “warrior board” of retired military officials that, some analysts fear, would be able to purge military officers who are not loyal to Trump. If he is confirmed by the Senate, Hegseth could be essential to carrying out that board’s recommendations.
All of this fits with a pattern of stoking culture wars based largely on white resentment in the interest of sustaining political support. As historian David W. Blight wrote in an astute New York Times column, “Trump exploited our social fissures to make them deeper, uglier, ever more bitter and therefore useful. We were reminded that culture wars are won by fueling them, not by seeking harmony. Unity coalitions and kindness and joy don’t win elections in a bitterly divided society where neighbors and family members are not on the same team.”
As perceptive as Blight’s assessment is, it misses the important global dimensions of Trump’s strategy and appeal. By pledging to abandon international climate agreements at a time of dangerous levels of warming (which even the head of Exxon Mobil says is a mistake), by opposing wind power and vowing to “drill baby, drill,” by threatening to impose unilateral tariffs on other countries as a core economic strategy, by pretending that the United States can prevail through tough guy optics and bluster, Trump is engaging in an elaborate fantasy that is both pedigreed and dangerous.
It is an approach to politics that is based on nostalgia for a time when, as the historian Greg Grandin has written, the world seemed for many Americans to be an open frontier—that period in the 19th and 20th centuries when it was permissible to pretend that “America” essentially meant “white,” and that with sufficient will, Washington could bend the rest of the globe to its whims.
There were elements of this ethos in past administrations—notably, in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush—but even those leaders knew that going it alone and humiliating allies was not smart, and that appeals to racial identity carried political dangers. Trump, however, fully taps into chagrin over the loss of that unquestioned privilege.
What is more, Trump’s brand of voluntarism—his vision of a United States that can say no to whatever displeases it—arrives at a time of relative decline in Washington’s standing in the world compared with its principal rival, China, and even with a larger set of rising middle powers. The United States is about to learn that in order to succeed, it will need strong cooperation with others and more internal harmony of its own. Four years on the path that Trump is setting could be an expensive learning process for the entire nation.