Lots of confused nonsense there. You said that you made no ad hominem remarks. What you meant to say is that you did make some in retaliation for what you regard as ad hominem in my article. The fact is that you did go ad hominem by insinuating that I don’t have the “desire” to understand Trumpism, which implies that I’m writing in bad faith.
What I said in the article is that many Southerners evidently don’t know how to think in the terms that the modern world has established. That’s a cognitive explanation for how these albatrosses (racism and religious fundamentalism) have persisted in that country.
Anyway, white supremacy returned to the political discourse in the US under the guises of the alt-right, populist, and intellectual dark web movements (just as Antifa shows up in progressive rallies). Trump and Fox News normalized those movements and their “great replacement” argument. Your insistence that Trump isn’t himself a white supremacist goes after a strawman. The standard charge against Trump is that he’s transactional, not ideological. His mental disorder (malignant narcissism) prevents him from caring about ideas, logic, or the truth. He acts solely to aggrandize himself. Thus, he makes “deals” with whomever is willing to flatter or to serve him.
The reason Trump defends the far right and insinuated that those torch-bearing white supremacists are “good people” is just that most Americans are repulsed by him, so he has nowhere left to go for cultists. Just as most banks turn him down, knowing he’s ready to go bankrupt to avoid paying his debts, Trump has had to settle for adoring fans from sectors of the population that have nothing to lose or that want to exploit Trump’s disorders in turn.
That’s what the racists and Evangelical Christians are doing. They aim to exploit Trump, just as Trump exploits them to obtain the only thing he cares about: the aggrandizement of himself. They attend his rallies, cheer him on, and threaten the GOP establishment on his behalf, so Trump defends them. It’s not about racist ideology for Trump. It’s about a sad mental disorder.
Links below on the reality of white supremacy in the US.
And why would you think this is just a fiction? What happened to the Southern racists after the Civil War? What happened to the lynchers of African Americans, and to the culture that led to the Ku Klux Klan? Or what happened to the American Nazi sympathizers? Did the North somehow annihilate the underlying racist culture in the South, along with the discriminatory laws? No, the racism that was obvious and once institutional in the US has persisted largely because the Southern culture was never overhauled. Lots of children still would have learned the racism from their parents because the US enshrines the freedom of speech. Thus, your claim that American white supremacy is a myth looks like gaslighting.
NPR showed the economic data on a graph. Lots of other sources report the same thing (links below). Unemployment was going down for minorities in a trend that began in 2010. Consequently, the claim that Trump’s policies caused that trend or are responsible for it is misleading. True, Trump could have ended the trend, and if he were a flaming Nazi and a competent politician he might have done so. But that’s a strawman. Remember the standard charge against Trump: he’s a transactional, incompetent, grossly mentally disordered demagogue, not an ideological politician. Even if he were motivated by racist ideology, he wouldn’t have known how to systematically harm minorities because he had no government experience.
Indeed, he wanted to end the masses of illegal immigrants from Central America, and he failed since they’re still coming. And he failed because he had no idea what he was doing and didn’t know how to think critically. He said building a wall would stop them. He built hardly any of the wall because he’s incompetent. (He’s incompetent in business too. He’s rich because he inherited over $400 million from his father, as the NY Times showed.)
You ask how narcissism is harmful. The reason Trump is popular isn’t because many Americans think he’ll fix their problems. It’s because they resent the American establishment and the institutions that haven’t been working for them (because the US is plutocratic), and they loathe politicians in general (as they should). They prefer Trump precisely because his disorders make him a wreaking ball. They want Trump to avenge them against the deep state, to sabotage and destroy much of the government, and to entertain them with trolling drama that further toxifies the polarized culture and its political discourse.
Just the delay in acting against global warming would be harmful. And let’s not forget the damage done by a right-wing Supreme Court, which will harm Trump’s voters in countless ways by serving the richest one percent. And how about the lowering of global confidence in the US, due to this hit to its reputation, which fuels the autocratic backlash against democracies and empowers the likes of Russia and China?
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/how-nations-schools-taught-white-supremacism/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/white-supremacy-returned-mainstream-politics/
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https://www.brookings.edu/articles/has-trump-failed-black-americans/
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-obama-trump-numbers-tiktok-idUSKBN28D34P
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/01/trump-black-americans-policies-433744
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm
