Sure, Trump voters are worried about discrimination — against white people

That Donald Trump is an unrepentant bigot is beyond debate at this point. In fairness, it’s been beyond debate for decades now, but all the more so after the past four years of making racism and discrimination the centerpiece of his entire presidential tenure. Given that Trump is very publicly racist and that his politics are a requisite byproduct thereof, it’s perfectly accurate to assert that supporting Donald Trump is, in and of itself, a tacit approval of the bigotry he represents.

I raise this obvious truism in light of a recent poll from the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Project Home Fire, which shows an overwhelming majority of people who voted for Donald Trump, a block that skews heavily toward white people, are very worried about racism and discrimination — specifically, against, yup, white people.

When asked by pollsters whether they were “worry that discrimination against whites will increase significantly in the next few years,” a whopping 84% of Trump voters “somewhat” agreed, while more than half — 52% — agreed “strongly.” Paradoxically, 49% of Trump voters somewhat agreed with the statement that Hispanic and Asian immigrants face “substantial discrimination” in the United States today, while at the same time slightly fewer agreed that systemic racism in American is a “real and serious problem.”

“Our initial analysis suggests that 56% of the electorate profile as unpersuadable on immigration and cultural matters at this time,” poll authors Mick McWilliams and Larry Schack explained in their analysis of the respondent answers. “Trump voters make up a significantly larger portion of this group,” the pair added.

The poll, conducted from the last week July through the first week of August, drew on answers from more than 1,000 Trump supporters, and 1,000 people who supported President Biden. While the study’s authors concluded — somewhat surprisingly, given Trump’s bellicose rhetoric on the subject — that immigration “does not set up as an ‘all or nothing’ issue” and that “these voters are concerned about immigration but are also more persuadable on this topic,” the stark number of Trump voters concerned about anti-white discrimination shows the degree to which the Republican Party is held in the thrall of a fundamental (and likely willful) misreading of what racism is and how it is promulgated in this country. Because while instances of anti-white discrimination certainly do exist — who can forget the time Tucker Carlson gave prime airtime to a college student whose face had been edited onto a picture of a literal cracker? — they in no way come close to matching the overarching, systemic structures that benefitted white people at the overt expense of marginalized and minority communities for centuries.