It Didn’t Start with Trump, and It’s Not Going to End with Him.
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Last night (Tuesday, March 24) KPBS ran an unusually compelling and quite chilling documentary called White with Fear, produced, directed, and written by Andrew Goldberg and dedicated to the proposition that (as I’ve argued previously in my zengersmag blog posts) the real origin of the Right-wing movement that eventually elected Donald Trump to the Presidency not once but twice (heaven help us all!) was in the late 1960’s, when Richard Nixon ran for President for the second time in 1968 and won. Goldberg’s presentation noted the white racialist terror that became widespread in the mid- to late-1960’s as Black ghettoes across the country exploded into riots. He artfully used archival footage to show, among other things, a suburban woman senior citizen in the white suburb of Dearborn, Michigan who bought a gun and taught herself to use it, showing up at target ranges, for fear that her community would be invaded by Black people from nearby Detroit. In 1968 Nixon and U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (D turned I turned R-South Carolina) concocted what they called the “Southern Strategy” as a response to the threat George Wallace’s independent Presidential candidacy posed to Nixon’s campaign. The “Southern Strategy” turned out far better than expected; it seemed that a large number of working-class whites all across America harbored deep racial resentments and formed a constituency that the Republicans could easily tap into. With the Democrats, formerly the party of slavery, secession, and the Ku Klux Klan, having largely abandoned their racist constituency and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the racist vote was up for grabs and the Republicans gleefully seized on it. Goldberg’s program did an interesting comparison of Nixon and Trump as both being driven by personal resentments. In Nixon’s case it was coming from a hard-scrabble lower-class background in Whittier, California and watching while upper-class elites grabbed all the honors that he thought should have been his; in Trump’s (though Goldberg didn’t make this case explicitly) it was from being the son of a real-estate mogul who’d made his fortune in the outer boroughs of New York City but hadn’t been able to crack Manhattan.
In my own writings I’ve argued that Nixon was the Jekyll-and-Hyde President; Jekyll-Nixon wanted to do good things for the country, like environmental protection (he signed into law the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which Trump has now eviscerated), national health insurance (Nixon’s proposal was actually more radical than Barack Obama’s and would have covered a lot more people at lower cost), a guaranteed income. Hyde-Nixon did things like keeping the Viet Nam War going at least four years longer than it should have and attempting to rig the 1972 Presidential election in his favor through the myriad of “dirty tricks” that became known collectively as Watergate. The first step in the creation of the modern radical Right in the U.S. was the Nixon/Thurmond “Southern Strategy” in 1968. Nixon ran explicitly on a promise to bring “law and order” back to America – as did Trump in both 2016 and 2024 – and a number of Leftists dredged up this old quote from Adolf Hitler in 1932 (a year before he took absolute power in Germany): “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes, without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order." In his 1968 and 1972 campaigns, Nixon proved a master of what Goldberg and other commentators before him called “dog-whistle racism,” making appeals to racist voters through coded language like “law and order” and “welfare queens.”
In 1968 Nixon and Wallace together got 57 percent of the vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent, a sign that after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win in 1964 (the last time a Democrat won the majority of white voters in a U.S. Presidential election), the U.S. had firmly realigned itself Rightward. In 1972 Nixon won the sort of landslide re-election victory Trump falsely claimed for himself in 2024, carrying every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, at least partly due to the Watergate “dirty tricks” and a fratricidal war within the Democratic Party largely over the Viet Nam war. Despite the GOP’s short-lived near-collapse in the mid-1970’s as a result of Watergate, the Republicans made a sweeping comeback in the 1980 and 1984 elections with Ronald Reagan, who continued Nixon’s successful campaign to win white working-class voters by dog-whistle appeals to their racism. One hugely important thing Reagan did in office was in 1987, when his appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that had given broadcast radio and TV stations an obligation to present all sides of a political issue. This allowed the conversion of the AM radio band from music (whose broadcasters had largely abandoned it in favor of the better-sounding FM band) to talk, and by far the most popular talk-radio shows were Right-wing political propaganda from hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, both of whom appear via archival clips in White with Fear. Limbaugh’s shows seem eerily premonitory of Trump’s, both in the sneering contempt and hatred with which he greeted anyone with a different point of view from his and in the fanatical devotion of his followers, who described Limbaugh as “saying what I think” and proudly proclaimed themselves “dittoheads.” Goldberg mentioned Roger Ailes, who was on Nixon’s campaign staff in 1968 and then masterminded Limbaugh’s emergence as a radio and TV star and was present at the creation of Fox News, the cable channel launched in 1995 which brought the Right-wing propaganda and its sneering contempt for anything that could be described as “liberal” or “leftist” to TV. One of the interviewees was an early Fox executive who insisted that the channel be a legitimate news outlet – until Roger Ailes fired him and made it clear that Fox’s mission was to blur the “news” and “editorial” sides into a broad and devastatingly effective propaganda outlet pushing the Right-wing agenda 24/7.
Goldberg mentions various benchmarks in the evolution of America’s radical Right, including the report from the U.S. Census Bureau which predicted that by 2050 (later revised to 2030) more than half the American population would be non-white, which a lot of America’s white people regarded as a harbinger of doom. Also a key element in the Right’s evolution was the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, which seemed to be a fulfillment of one of racist America’s great fears: one of them is now the leader of this country. Obama’s election and the financial crisis he had to deal with immediately on taking office in turn led to the rise of the “Tea Party,” which swept the Republicans into control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Goldberg’s documentary includes a clip from CNBC host Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange against home borrowers who’d kept up their payments being asked to sacrifice for the sake of ones who hadn’t, which is widely credited with having kicked off the Tea Party. One key index of the influence the radical Right was having over American politics was the so-called “birther” campaign against Obama – led largely by his eventual successor, Donald Trump – that claimed he was “really” born in Kenya and/or that he was really a secret Muslim (though that didn’t stop the Right from attacking his actual Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and accusing him of fomenting racial hatred against whites). It was obviously a thinly veiled racist attack on Obama over the quite visible difference between him and every other American President. Obama got re-elected in 2012, despite confidence among national Republicans that in a low-turnout election (which 2012 was) he would lose.
One of Goldberg’s most interesting interviewees was Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for the RealClearPolitics Web site. After the 2012 election, while most mainstream Republicans were saying that the party needed to broaden its appeal to non-white voters, Trende published an analysis called “The Missing White Voters” saying that Obama had been re-elected because whites who had voted in 2004 and 2008 had sat out the 2012 election. In a follow-up article Trende published after Trump won the 2016 election (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/09/the_missing_white_voters_revisisted_132308.html), Trende wrote, “I reasoned that these were probably people who liked George W. Bush and perhaps John McCain, but were turned off by Mitt Romney’s wealth and patrician air. If Republicans nominated someone with more working-class appeal, I reasoned, these people could be motivated to vote.” Though Trende, both in his 2016 piece and in the White with Fear documentary, disclaimed the message often attributed to him that the Republicans should become a “whites-only” party, he wrote after Trump’s first victory, “[F]or now the best indications are that these voters were, in fact, inspired by a Republican candidate with more blue-collar appeal. Donald Trump did do better with nonwhites than Mitt Romney, which played a significant role in his victory. But there’s little doubt that a strong showing with these rural whites, who are disconnected from the global economy that increasingly defines urban and suburban environs, played a major role in his win.” Trump, for his own part, went Nixon and Reagan one better; instead of dog-whistle appeals to racism, he went for broke and spewed open hatred towards people of color in general and immigrants in particular. Trump’s defenders insist that not everyone who voted for Trump was a racist, but it’s clear that virtually all American voters who are racist supported (and still support) Trump.
Trump has shrewdly turned immigrants into an all-purpose scapegoat the way Adolf Hitler did with Jews. Trump was also able to grow his support among people of color in the 2024 election, notably by hooking them with conservative positions on so-called “culture war” issues. I remember a good Mexican-American friend of mine warning me during the 2016 campaign that a surprising number of U.S. citizen voters of Mexican descent were going to vote for Trump because they thought so-called “illegal aliens” were taking jobs away from them. Goldberg also discusses the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which argues that whites worldwide are falling victim to a demographic trend, masterminded by an international Jewish conspiracy, that is deliberately driving down economic opportunities for whites to boost them for people of color. Though I’m surprised that someone with so obviously Jewish-sounding a name as Goldberg didn’t stress more the anti-Semitic implications of the “Great Replacement Theory” – which, like the racist opposition to the 1960’s African-American civil rights movement, argued that people of color were too stupid and intellectually inferior to organize such movements on their own, so they were dependent on Jews to do it for them – old-fashioned Nazi-style anti-Semitism is at the root of the “Great Replacement Theory” and many of the people who advocate it. There’s an interview with one of Trump’s first-term White House staff members who thought he had arranged for Trump to deliver a full-throated condemnation of anti-Semitism and mob violence at Charlottesville, North Carolina in 2017. Instead Trump, probably advised by his dark eminence Stephen Miller (who wasn’t interviewed for White with Fear the way Steve Bannon was), delivered his now-infamous statement that “there were very fine people on both sides – on both sides.”
White with Fear is an ominous documentary that suggests that America’s radical-Right movement is a force with real staying power and determination to remake America into a Christian nationalist dictatorship in which all the gains women, African-Americans, other people of color, Queer people and especially Trans people will be reversed permanently. When Hillary Clinton, who was interviewed extensively in White with Fear, was debating Donald Trump in 2016, she asked him point-blank when he thought America had been “great” and to which he wanted to return to “make America great again.” Since then it’s become readily apparent: the period from 1870 to 1913, before Progressive legislation aimed at restricting the unlimited power of corporate America to treat workers and the environment as disposable commodities. It was also before the income tax (more than once Trump has said he hopes his tariff regime will eliminate the need for the federal government to charge and collect an income tax) and when U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures rather than directly by the people (which caused huge levels of corruption, as well-heeled would-be Senators like Leland Stanford of California literally bought their way into the Senate). It was before anyone was conscious of the environment as a political issue and urban dwellers were told that the growing levels of smoke in their cities were signs of “progress.” And of course it was also a time when African-Americans were losing the gains they had made during Reconstruction and being forced back into the position of a permanent service class as whites had always intended when they brought their ancestors here as slaves in the first place; when other Americans of color were being told they were here at the sufferance of whites and that could be revoked at any time when they “got out of line”; when women were being told that their destiny was, as the Nazis put it, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”) and total subservience to the men in their lives (their fathers when they were children and their husbands when they grew up) rather than any independent involvement in society; and Queer people were told they were the spawn of the Devil and they had no legitimate place in the world at all.
