Trump intuitively understood that this deep feeling of alienation could carry him to power. And so he didn’t just focus on division, denigrating Muslims or Black Americans as the “other.” He also emphasized the downgrading of the former white majority—America’s own sons of the soil. Like other ethnic entrepreneurs before him, he put the grievances of white, male, Christian, rural Americans into a simplified framework that painted them as victims whose rightful legacy had been stolen.
