MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: Trump’s White Nationalist Project

I am an admirer of the work of Princeton historian Kevin Kruse who has written extensively about the long reach of white supremacy in our American story.

Kruse’s book Fault Lines: The History of America Since 1974 – co-written with Julian Zelizer, also a Princeton historian – is a must read to help our understanding of what has happened to American politics over the last 50 years.

Kruse has written three excellent pieces over the last week that I unreserved recommend. You can find his newsletter “Campaign Trails” here.

And I thank Kevin Kruse for specifically and correctly saying this: “The Trump administration is, at its core, a white nationalist project.”

In the past few weeks, as this white nationalist project has run into resistance, the administration and its allies have dropped the mask entirely. As ICE agents roam the streets of Minneapolis, they’ve dropped any pretense that they’re looking for specific criminals, casually asking residents where they can find “Asians” and telling a detained pastor they let him go because he was white. Most ominously, while the assault on the city was predicated on claims that Somali immigrants were engaged in fraud, the ICE crackdown has targeted the entire Somali community, regardless of their connection to those charges; the president has denounced them as “animals” whose presence in America is “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

In case there’s anyone left in the United States who still can’t see the racism driving this administration, this administration has announced it in clear terms. Trump, of course, has led the way, with his endless rants about nonwhite people and places – the recurring “shithole countries” theme – while others throughout his administration and allies outside it, like Elon Musk, have perpetuated the “great replacement theory” at all levels.

And this is, well, a perfect distillation of Trumpist white nationalism:

The racism has gotten so overt and shameless that, in response to a Spanish-language halftime performance of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, Trump’s advisor and … uh, close companion? … Laura Loomer simply tweeted out “this isn’t white enough for me.”

To repeat: the Trump administration is, at its core, a white nationalist project.

Yes. Yes it is.

Cranks, weirdos and white supremacists

It would not be difficult to make a compelling case that Donald Trump set out to populate his administration with the most unqualified collection of dodgy no character nutters in the history of the American presidency.

But the cranks, weirdos, incompetents and Trump sycophants – I’m thinking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Dr. Oz, Pam Bondi, Telsi Gabbard and Howard Lutnick (to name just a few) – are only part of the larger Trump story.

With Trump himself sitting at the top of this administration of plonkers, the American government is, from top to bottom, populated with the most openly extremist white nationalist group of latter day Birchers and fascist adjacent boobs the country has ever experienced.

And beyond the Cabinet and White House staff so many in the near Trump solar system – Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Tucker Carlson, for example – hardly hide their fanatic views about race and “white culture.”

They keep showing us who they are

There is at the moment a precise case study of how this white nationalism is playing out beyond Trump’s Cabinet members and Trump whispers like Musk and Carlson.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a rather amazing hearing last week to consider the nomination of Jeremy Carl, a barmy senior fellow at the right wing Claremont Institute think tank. Trump has nominated Carl for the job of Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. ¹

He served in the first Trump Administration as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior where he is apparently remembered best for having a desk.

On the face of it Carl is demonstrably unqualified for the State Department job, but as his Claremont bio makes clear – Carl’s “primary focus is on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America” – he certainly checks the boxes to qualify for the administration’s white nationalist project. ²

The Foreign Relations Committee hearing was something else. You can watch the full hearing here.

As the Daily Montanan reported:

During the roughly two-hour hearing, though three other nominees testified about their appointments to other positions, the bulk of the time was spent focused on Carl and his extensive social media posting, speeches and writings that blamed the Jews for victimhood, claimed that “white culture” was being erased, and that Jan. 6 protestors were treated worse than African-Americans during the Jim Crow era.

Carl’s answers to a barrage of questions ranged from doubling-down to apologizing to claiming that his comments were being taken out of context. At least three Democratic senators said they were dumbfounded that a person with Carl’s beliefs would even be nominated to serve as one of America’s highest-ranking representatives to the U.N., because of his views, which favor white culture and Christianity while discounting diversity.

And here is The New York Times:

Mr. Carl has argued that white people should organize as a group to protect their rights.

“White Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded and in which, until recently, they were the overwhelming majority of the population,” he writes in his 2024 book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.”

He also accused the Democratic Party of waging an “all-out assault on the rights of white people.” (About 64 percent of the people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 were white, compared to Joe Biden’s 61 percent in 2020, according to Pew Research.)

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy was visibly flummoxed by Carl’s assertion that white Americans face more discrimination than Black Americans.

And Murphy tried to get Carl to describe just what he means by “white culture.”

(Hand slaps forehead …)

Perhaps the most enlightening exchange came when Virginia Senator Tim Kaine questioned Carl about his contention that a “cultural genocide” is underway in the United States with white Americans facing unspeakable dangers from, apparently, immigrants, Blacks, Latinos, etc.

It was rather … painful.

 

It comes from the top … and the bottom

So just put all these “threats” to “white culture” in the context of Donald Trump using social media to depict the first Black president and his wife as apes, add a dash of Trump referring to “shit hole countries” like Somalia, flavor with JD Vance’s lies about Haitian immigrants eat pet animals in Ohio and then let Secretary of State Marco Rubio bat cleanup by putting a more “moderate” sheen on the “white culture” cult, while never mentioning the term.

Here’s historian Heather Cox Richardson on Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference last weekend:

It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly “American” identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.

Rubio’s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S., and even though he called out the Rolling Stones, who built their body of work on that of Black American blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as part of “western civilization.” Rubio even ignored his own family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.

Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. He said the U.S. had “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline” and urged Europe to work with the U.S. for a return to western “dominance.”

Richardson also uses Kevin Kruse’s framing of a Trump “white cultural project.”

And it should be noted that most conservative officeholders and most of the Republican “base” simply have no use for a multi-cultural America. They don’t talk about the reality of the real America, a multi-ethnic, multi-religion society based on decades of immigration, and they see no need to acknowledge let alone accept a nation that is not white dominant.

This attitude explains, rather simply, the right’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, the Pentagon’s dismissal of a host of Black officers, the removal of Black history and on and on.

One lone Republican

Back to that bizarre confirmation hearing for Jeremy Carl last week.

It was notable that only one Republican member of the committee asked Carl a question about his well publicized views. That Republican is Utah Senator John Curtis. Here’s the Salt Lake Tribune:

“After reviewing his record and participating in today’s hearing,” Curtis said in a statement Thursday, “I do not believe that Jeremy Carl is the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums, and I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated.”

A spokesperson for Sen. Mike Lee, who also sits on the committee, did not respond to questions about his position on Carl’s nomination. He did not ask questions during the hearing.

Curtis’s opposition, if it holds, could block Carl’s goofy and profoundly concerning nomination.

Good, but why is this so hard for conservative officeholders?

Why not clearly reject such nonsense

How difficult is it, really, to object to this open and blatant white supremacy and anti-Semitism?

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James Risch of Idaho – a state with a long, difficult history of attracting neo-Nazis and other associated white supremacists – presided over the Carl hearing and said … nothing.

Same with Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts, who just days earlier condemned Trump’s racist assault on the Obamas. Yet given a public platform to push back on Carl’s crackpot theories Ricketts took a pass.

Silence in the face of such abusing craziness is simply acceptance.

This craziness will continue

Maybe the opposition of John Curtis will stop this one mindless Trump nominee, but the white supremacy project will go on.

The vast majority of Americans, if you believe the research, reject the views of Trump and Jeremy Carl, but a not insignificant number – the Trump base, I think – say bring it on.

Here’s Heath Druzin, a journalist who has covered the white nationalist movement, on some of the most recent research:

Roughly one in three Americans are Christian nationalists or sympathetic to the cause, according to a new survey.

The survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, also found strong connections between support for Christian nationalism and support for the Republican Party and President Donald Trump in particular.

“I think the threat is (to) our democracy,” said Public Religion Research Institute CEO Melissa Deckman. “We found consistently that Christian nationalists tend to endorse more illiberal views in the sense that they’re more likely to embrace more authoritarian views, which can essentially be used to justify limiting access to the ballot for some people, or it can be used to use undemocratic means to stay in power.”

Most Christian nationalists want America to be a theocracy ruled explicitly by biblical principles, often interpreted through a fundamentalist lens. Many also think only Christians should be able to hold political office.

So Risch and Ricketts and Mike Lee and so many others really are captive of the white supremacist base of the modern Republican Party.

As I have written in the past these guys are truly afraid of their own voters and that fear makes it impossible for them to address these issues.

Again, Heath Druzin:

[Melissa] Deckman said if Americans want to see Christian nationalism banished to the fringes again, demographics are on their side.

“I guess the answer is … voting,” she said. “I think that you know this is something that’s not going to change overnight, necessarily. You know, younger Americans are more secular, they’re less likely to be conservative Christians. I think it’s just a matter of people voting right and getting enough people who are willing to challenge these kinds of viewpoints within the Republican Party.”

As they say, you have one job. Vote.