Elon Musk and far-reaching cuts led by his Department of Government Efficiency drew the sharpest reactions at a town hall in Evanston, Wyo., held by Representative Harriet M. Hageman. Photo: Kim Raff for The New York Times
Only 3 months into his term, there is a growing discontent among Trump’s white supporters as his policies harm their economic interests. There is potential for backlash if he continues to alienate them by treating them as if they are Black.
On a recent episode of her podcast, Hysteria, the host, Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former White House deputy chief of staff, read a tweet from a woman who identified herself as Marylin, complaining about the newly formed Department of Governmental Efficiency and its hatchet man, the billionaire entrepreneur, Elon Musk:
“My daughter is losing her job thanks to DOGE. I voted for President Trump three times. My daughter is a hardworking, excellent worker for the. . .National Forest (Service). She doesn’t work for DEI; she runs the office. I am pissed at POTUS and Elon Musk. It’s not right.”
When someone tweeted “MAGA,” in response, Marilyn erupted:
“My daughter is not Black, dammit. WTF Trump?”
Her guest, Akilah Hughes, responded tauntingly:
“That does seem like the shorthand. Why is she getting fired, she’s not Black?. . .I thought I voted against DEI not against my kids. . .you know the brown ones.”
Mastromonaco chimed in:
“I thought my kids were going to get promoted, you know, not fired.”
Hughes again:
“I thought you were going to get rid of the Black person who was their boss and then they were gonna be the boss.”
Mastromonaco concluded:
“The president’s actions are really hurting his own constituents.”
As the Trump administration closes in on its first two months in office, polls show that his deep spending cuts and inattention to inflation is costing him support from his base of working-class whites who elected him to restore their standard of living at the expense, preferably, of African Americans and other racialized groups who most view as their bitter rivals.
To be sure, Trump has indeed delivered on campaign promises such as gutting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives and rounding up immigrants but has also attacked popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicaid, and a federal workforce that employs more workers than any other institution in the U.S. With a slew of lawsuits and court rulings, the situation is fluid but an analysis last month by Bloomberg Law found that Musk had fired nearly 30,000 federal employees across the country in DOGE’s first month in operation. The Education Department last week announced that it was firing more than 1,300 workers from the agency that manages federal loans for college students, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools; the job cuts combined with the 572 employees who accepted voluntary separation packages and 63 fired probationary workers to reduce the total number of department employees by nearly half its size from the beginning of the year.
What’s more, Republicans in the House of Representatives last month adopted an administration budget proposal instructing the Energy and Commerce Committee to identify $880 billion in mandatory spending cuts over a 10-years-period from Medicaid, the government health insurer that covers nearly 80 million low-income and disabled Americans. Simultaneously, the Social Security Administration announced that it planned to slash 7,000 jobs from the agency’s workforce of 57,000 to comply with Trump’s executive order.
It's early still but the loudening outcry from Republican voters like Madelyn raises a critical question: will Trump be the first president in the history of the Republic whose administration is undone by treating whites, more or less, like n-words?
Across the country, Trump supporters are expressing buyer’s remorse.
“He’s doing 80 miles an hour,” Gary Dixon, a Trump supporter, told the Wall Street Journal. “I wouldn’t mind if he went around 55.”
Nearly as troubling as their actions is that Trump and his supporters have assumed a “let-them-eat-cake” stance on their proposals to slash entitlements and job cuts to a federal workforce that is 61 percent white, with Musk bizarrely describing Social Security as a Ponzi scheme on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, and Trump referring to federal employees in cryptic language that has typically been reserved for African Americans.
“We want to get rid of the people that aren’t working, that aren’t showing up and have a lot of problems.”
That echoed Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump supporter, who told reporters last month:
“Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They're consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American taxpayer. People who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes, and then pay these federal employees. Federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.”
It is one thing for a politician to scapegoat African Americans as undeserving of public largesse but quite another to indict “hardworking” whites, who are suing the executive branch and pouring into the streets to protest layoffs. Trump has tread more lightly in touting proposals to cut entitlement spending and for good reason. Medicaid and Social Security are widely known as parts of the third rail of American politics and politicians are forewarned: touch it and die.
In that same vein, the purge of federal workers stands in stark contrast to persistent inflation which Trump pledged to tackle during the campaign but has so far not addressed. If anything, economists agree that his proposals to implement tariffs on Canadian, Mexican and Chinese exports will likely cause prices on consumer goods to continue to rise. This puts Republicans in a politically untenable position: further depleting consumer buying power while inflation spikes.
Last month, a Republican congressman in a deep red district told angry constituents worried about federal job cuts that "God has a plan" for them. Missouri Representative Mark Alford told a packed coffee shop in suburban Kansas City, that a position with the federal government was not “a lifetime appointment.”
“So I would encourage anyone who finds themselves in this situation to realize that we are going to get this economy turning again. There are jobs available. God has a plan and purpose for your life.”
This spells imminent disaster for a Trump administration that seems intent on lowering wages that have not risen appreciably, when adjusted for inflation, in nearly half a century.
In his three presidential campaigns, Trump has used America’s racial polarization to great advantage by depicting Democrats as carpetbagging, liberal n-word lovers and appealing in plain language to whites, especially the working class, who fear, absurdly, that they are losing ground to African Americans and Latino immigrants. (It didn’t help that Hilary Clinton described Trump supporters as “deplorables.)
As I write in my book, Class War in America: How the Elites Divide the Nation by Asking ‘Are You a Worker or Are You White?’ dividing workers by tribe is a tried-and-true political strategy, dating back to the Reconstruction era, when Southern Democrats like South Carolina’s Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman managed to reclaim high political office from Republicans by pathologizing African American voters, ginning up sexual stereotypes, and pitting workers against each other, often exhorting whites to carry out lynchings and violent pogroms such as the 1898 massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, or Atlanta eight years later.
In all but demographics, the U.S. political system resembles South Africa’s apartheid government which was created in 1948 to appease white soldiers who returned from World War II to find that their factory jobs had been taken by African farmworkers who moved to the cities in their absence. Apartheid codified the white minority’s privilege into law by reducing Africans to guest workers in the land of their birth. When apartheid ended in 1994, there was not a single poor white person in the entire country.
This is what Trump fails to understand. He is only useful to his electoral base as a guarantor of white prosperity. Any substantive decline in white living standards violates the racial contract signed by virtually all politicians, Black and white. Rubbing their misfortune in their faces is simply unforgivable; his presidency won’t survive the combination of immiserating and humiliating whites.
Simultaneously, Trump can’t easily really fix an economy that has been fundamentally broken by nearly 45 years of nickel and diming African Americans, who account for 13 percent of the population. Shipping decent-paying manufacturing jobs offshore, redlining, discrimination in the labor market, the prison-industrial complex, subprime mortgage fraud, privatization of utilities, college debt and municipal tax schemes that undermine economic development have combined over four decades to leave African Americans without enough disposable income to sustain a consumer economy. In other words, racist policies of Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes, Obama, Biden and Trump were the ruination of the U.S. economy. How exactly does the consumer marketplace thrive if one of every seven households doesn’t have the money to buy consumer goods?
Suffice it to say that neither Trump nor Musk has read Hegel. Both are in for a rude awakening, however. Barring something unforeseen, the best-case scenario for Trump is to leave the White House in four years with record-low poll numbers, the Republican party in disgrace, and the consensus among the working class that neither team blue nor team red is capable of meeting the most basic needs of the American people.
The worst-case scenario is that he is drummed out of office like Richard Nixon. Because an apartheid state where whites are treated like n-words is simply intolerable.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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