It’s not like this has been subtle so far, but the White male resentment that fuels Donald Trump‘s rocket ride at the top of the Republican primary polls has thus far managed to escape the attention of media types both mainstream and liberal, many of whom continue to insist that Trump’s appeal is that of an “outsider.”
This weekend, though, that secret sauce came to vibrant life, as if some children found a magical silk hat and placed it on a racist snowman. At a Trump rally in in Birmingham, Alabama (Birmingham!) a #BlackLivesMatter protester was assaulted by Trump supporters who chanted (and I’m not kidding) “All Lives Matter!”
If you tried to write a scene to dramatize the resentment that Trump is tapping into, it would look exactly like this:
Make no mistake about it, the chanting of “All Lives Matter” is rooted in White resentment, whether you think that resentment is fair or not. It’s a response to the audacious notion that someone, somewhere, should care when black people are brutalized or killed by the police, or disproportionately policed and incarcerated. If you’re one of the people chanting it, you feel the resentment is justified, but you definitely feel the resentment.
If that were the end of it, this would still be an indictment of the climate Trump has created, and a make-good on the threat he issued when he responded to Bernie Sanders‘ run-in with #BlackLivesMatter by saying “That will never happen with me. I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself, or if other people will.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Normally, you could try to excuse something like this by surmising that the candidate would never approve of such an action, but on Sunday, Trump made it very clear that he was most definitely down with the struggle… of his White supporters.
