How white victimhood is shaping a second Trump term

The Republican party is going in two directions on race at the same time.

Electorally speaking, the modern GOP has never been so diverse. Each of the past two elections, and most available 2024 polling, reveals the GOP making real inroads with Black and (especially) Latino voters. These gains shouldn’t be overstated — Democrats still dominate among non-whites as a whole — but they are real.

But at the elite level, conservative intellectuals and operatives are developing a new doctrine of white identity politics. And it’s already shaping the Trump administration’s plans for a second term.

A new book on “anti-white racism” — The Unprotected Class, by Claremont Institute fellow Jeremy Carl — illustrates this trend clearly. 

Its April release went unheralded outside conservative circles, but it received laudatory attention inside them. Tucker Carlson praised it as “outstanding”; leading activist Chris Rufo described it as a “must-read.” Nate Hochman, a former speechwriter for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, called it “the most important thing you read this year.” Carl got friendly interviews on Donald Trump Jr.’s web show and on Fox News during primetime.

Carl’s book centers on the claim that “anti-white racism is the most predominant and politically powerful form of racism in America today.” What mainstream scholars of race call “white privilege” is, in his view, a series of “informal evanescent cultural legacies.” By contrast, anti-white discrimination “is increasingly legal and formal.”

This discrimination is, for Carl, primarily the product of a pernicious ideology popular among elites (nonwhite and white alike). “Anti-white racism is the all-but-official ideology of our ruling regime,” he writes — and they have acted in such a way as to ensure that whites are increasingly shunted to the bottom of America’s social hierarchy.

Carl’s arguments for this view resemble a funhouse mirror version of American racial history: roughly the same series of events, but with the roles of victim and perpetrator reversed.

Everyone agrees, for example, that the integration of America’s cities led white people to move to suburbs and other outlying areas. Traditionally, historians and social scientists see this as a manifestation of white racism: either white urbanites worried about the effects of integration on property values or they simply disliked living near Black people. The flight of white wealth then deprived Black people and neighborhoods of high-quality public services, recreating the inequalities of de jure segregation on a de facto basis.

But Carl argues that white flight can more accurately be described as a reaction to anti-white racism. He claims that integration brings crime, often involving minority perpetrators targeting longtime white residents (Carl sources data on “interracial murder” to the anonymous Twitter account @fentasyl). The situation for whites is so perilous, Carl argues, that it’s akin to state-sanctioned mob assaults on Jews in czarist Russia. 

“Anti-white crime functions as a twenty-first-century de facto pogrom, driving whites out of areas where they have lived for decades,” he writes.

Carl’s version of white identity politics is hardly isolated on the intellectual right. He cites two other prominent book, by New York Times contributor Christopher Caldwell and think tanker Richard Hanania, to argue that the legal roots of anti-white racism were created by the legislative victories of the civil rights movement. Their accounts align on the idea that the basic structure of anti-discrimination protections — including the Civil Rights Act of 1965 — needs to be overhauled or repealed entirely.

Of course, conservatives have complained about “reverse racism” for decades. What’s new is not just the aggressiveness of Carl’s claims and others like them, but their direct connection to radical policy proposals — and the fact that people in positions of power appear to be listening.

In April, Axios’s Alex Thompson reported that “close Trump allies” are planning a second-term overhaul of anti-discrimination law, one that would “dramatically change the government’s interpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of color.”

Much of this work, per Thompson, is coming out of America First Legal — the law practice of infamous Trump aide Stephen Miller. Since leaving government, Miller has filed a number of lawsuits alleging anti-white discrimination. Examples include a suit against the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview a minority candidate for some high-level coaching positions, as well as a successful bid to block pandemic assistance for women-and-minority-owned restaurants.

Miller is poised to play an important role in a second Trump administration. Ty Cobb, Trump’s former attorney, told the Guardian that “Trump is looking to Miller” when it comes to choosing his White House lawyers and Justice Department officials. With that kind of power, Miller’s quest to write white identity politics into law could well start succeeding next year.

This story appeared originally in On the Right, a newsletter about the ideas and trends driving the conservative movement. Sign up here for future editions.