No, Trump Did Not Win Because of Racism and Misogyny
Columbia students understand Trump's victory for everything except what it actually is.
What’s interesting about our community’s reaction to the election is both the collective anger and understanding about how Trump won. On Instagram, there were endless stories and posts from our classmates expressing their grievances, fears, and anxieties about what the next four years might look like. I personally share many of these trepidations. Our feeds have been flooded with long paragraphs of emotional testimony, as well as unapologetic attacks against those who voted for Trump.
One post I’ve noticed circulating consistently includes one of James Baldwin’s most famous declarations: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” Another mega-viral repost is an X post that simply says: “the only thing america hates more than a rapist is a woman.”
But there’s more to this story.
It is fundamentally anti-intellectual to declare that Trump won this election only because of our nation’s dark history with race and gender. Americans who live outside our well-insulated liberal bubble have been struggling on numerous fronts. Inflation from the pandemic has jacked up prices, and, as this election reveals, the Americans who decide elections voted for Trump because he successfully played his cards at the battle of political perception.
His logic was simple: Harris means prices will stay high, and Trump means prices will go down (“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”). Of course, there’s no actual evidence that such a reductive argument about our economy is true. But the Trump campaign understood that the granular details of their economic plan didn’t matter. What mattered was how they could make people feel.
What’s more, most Americans do not spend their time in an Ivy League classroom learning about white supremacy and race in America. It’s not that they inherently have hate or prejudice in their hearts, but rather that their American experience is fundamentally different from ours.
We may find voting for Trump to be problematic and indicative of an alarming willingness to overlook the president-elect’s expression of every “-ism” out there. But I cannot stress this enough: Most Americans aren’t thinking about this, and they do not care. Yes, you might argue that this is a source of privilege the marginalized do not have, to not have to think about the dynamics of social progress in our nation. But this is not the same as being a white supremacist, and in fact, it’s far from it.
This argument stands on ever-shakier grounds when we remind ourselves that Trump made unprecedented gains with minority and immigrant voters—exit polling found that white, college-educated women and voters over 65 were the only demographics that shifted toward Democrats since 2020.
I hope we can all remember that the vast majority of Trump voters do not wear that eye-catching ruby-red hat, and it is foolish and inaccurate to accuse those who do of being bigots. When we ask ourselves why Trump won this election from within the Columbia bubble, I hope that we all look at the bigger picture, which, without fail, is always more complex, confusing, confounding, and troubling than we may think.
Mr. Nagin is a junior in the Trinity College Dublin Dual BA program studying political science. He is the Deputy Editor of Sundial.