One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice. Through the explicit practice of White-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles. Thus his strongest supporters during the Jan. 6 riot felt free to carry Confederate battle flags and wear “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts without fear of reproof from their political allies. Many in the crowd surely didn’t consider themselves racists, but they were perfectly willing to make common cause with racists. In social effect, it is a distinction without a difference.

The result has been an illuminating but horrifying clarity. A periodical called American Greatness — the closest Trumpism gets to an intellectual house organ — recently published an article by Alexander Zubatov that provided a night tour of New York City. Addicts he encountered lay in “piles of rags and filth and the stench of their own excrement.” Some “brown bums” were “like ungainly insects going through the motion of a mating ritual.” The city and nation, he explains, are filled with “a growing mass of fat, lazy leeches, slugs, thugs, gangbangers, rule-breakers, whiners and perpetual ne’er-do-wells.”  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-is-now-just-the-party-of-white-grievance/2021/03/01/67679480-7ab9-11eb-85cd-9b7fa90c8873_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3045b20%2F603e6e199d2fda4c88f94a90%2F59741f459bbc0f1cdcfbb98e%2F17%2F68%2F603e6e199d2fda4c88f94a90