Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up

In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.

With all his histrionics and theatrics, Trump brought the dark side of American politics to the fore: the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony. The segregationist segment of the electorate has been a permanent fixture of American politics, shifting between the two major parties.

For more than two decades, scholars and analysts have written about the growing partisan antipathy and polarization that have turned America into two warring camps, politically speaking.

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case via Twitter that Trump has “served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs.” The solidification of their control over the Republican Party “makes it seem like a partisan issue. But this faction has been around longer than our current partisan divide.” In fact, “they are not loyal to a party — they are loyal to white Christian domination.”

Trump’s success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination: the traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer ensures success, and may, instead, prove a liability.

For those seeking to emulate Trump — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, for example — the basic question is whether Trump’s trajectory is replicable or whether there are unexplored avenues to victory at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

When Trump got into the 2016 primary race, “he did not have a clear coalition, nor did he have the things candidates normally have when running for president: political experience, governing experience, or a track record supporting party issues and ideologies,” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. Lacking these traditional credentials, Trump sought out “the underserved market within the Republican electorate by giving those voters what they might have wanted, but weren’t getting from the other mainstream selections.”

The objectives of the Trump wing of the Republican Party stand out in other respects, especially in the strength of its hostility to key Democratic minority constituencies.

Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi — a co-author, with Mason and John Kane of N.Y.U., of a just published paper, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support” — put it this way in reply to my emailed query:

The Trump coalition is motivated by animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. This animosity has no bearing on support for any of the other G.O.P. elites or the party itself. Warmth toward whites and Christians equally predict support for Trump, other G.O.P. elites, and the party itself. The only area where Trump support is different than other G.O.P. support is in regards to harnessing this out-group animus.

For as long as Trump remains the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, Wronski continued, “this animosity coalition will define the party.”

Animosity toward these four Democratic-aligned minority groups is not limited to Republican voters. Mason, Wronski and Kane created an “animus to Democrat groups” scale, ranked from zero at the least hostile to 1.0 at the most. Kane wrote me that

approximately 18 percent of Democrats have scores above the midpoint of the scale (which would mean negative feelings/animus). For Independents, this percentage grows to 33 percent. For Republicans, it jumps substantially to 45 percent.

The accompanying demographic demonstrates Kane’s point.

The three authors go on:

Animosity toward Democratic-linked groups predicts Trump support, rather remarkably, across the political spectrum. Further, given the decisive role that Independents can play in elections, these results suggest that reservoirs of animosity are not necessarily specific to a particular party, and may therefore be tapped by any political elite.

Before Trump took center stage in 2015, Republican leaders were determined to “stymie Democratic policy initiatives, resist compromise, and make it clear that Republicans desire to score political victories and win back power from Democrats,” Kane wrote in his email, but “establishment Republicans generally did not openly demonize, much less dehumanize, Democratic politicians at the national level.”

Trump, Kane continued,

wantonly disregarded this norm, and now Trump’s base may come to expect future Republican elites to be willing to do the same. If this practice eventually comes to be seen as a “winning strategy” for Republican politicians as a whole, it could bring us into a new era of polarization wherein Republican cooperation with the “Demon Rats” is seen not just as undesirable, but thoroughly unconscionable.

Most significantly, in Mason’s view, is that

there is a faction in American politics that has moved from party to party, can be recruited from either party, and responds especially well to hatred of marginalized groups. They’re not just Republicans or Democrats, they’re a third faction that targets parties.

Bipartisanship, Mason continued in a lengthy Twitter thread, “is not the answer to the problem. We need to confront this particular faction of Americans who have been uniquely visible and anti-democratic since before the Civil War (when they were Democrats).”

In their paper, Mason, Wronski and Kane conclude:

This research reveals a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain. Trump’s unique ability to do so is not the only cause for normative concern. Instead, we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters’ political judgments. Should America wish to become a fully multiracial democracy, it will need to reconcile with these hostile attitudes themselves.

Adam Enders, a political scientist at the University of Louisville, and Uscinski, in their June 2021 paper “On Modeling the Social-Psychological Foundations of Support for Donald Trump” describe a “Trump voter profile”: “an amalgamation of attitudes about, for example, racial groups, immigrants and political correctness — that rivals partisanship and ideology as predictors of Trump support and is negatively related to support for mainstream Republican candidates.”

In an email, Enders described this profile as fitting those attracted to Trump’s

relatively explicit appeal to xenophobia, racial prejudice, authoritarianism, sexism, conspiracy thinking, in combination with his outsider status that gives him credibility as the anti-establishment candidate. The Trump voter profile is a constellation of social-psychological attitudes — about various racial groups, women, immigrants, and conspiracy theories — that uniquely predict support for Donald Trump.

Uscinski and Enders are the lead authors of a forthcoming paper, “American Politics in Two Dimensions: Partisan and Ideological Identities versus Anti-Establishment Orientations,” in which they argue that

Our current conceptualization of mass opinion is missing something. Specifically, we theorize that an underappreciated, albeit ever-present, dimension of opinion explains many of the problematic attitudes and behaviors gripping contemporary politics. This dimension, which we label “anti-establishment,” rather than explaining one’s attitudes about and behaviors toward the opposing political coalition, captures one’s orientation toward the established political order irrespective of partisanship and ideology.

In the case of Trump and other anti-democratic leaders around the world, Uscinski and Enders contend that

anti-establishment sentiments are an important ingredient of support for populist leaders, conspiratorial beliefs, and political violence. And, while we contend that this dimension is orthogonal to the left-right dimension of opinion along which partisan and ideological concerns are oriented, we also theorize that it can be activated by strategic partisan politicians. As such, phenomena which are oftentimes interpreted as expressions of “far-right” or “far-left” orientations may not be borne of left-right views at all, but rather of the assimilation of anti-establishment sentiments into mainstream politics by elites.

Anti-establishment voters, Uscinski and Enders write, “are more likely to believe that the ‘one percent’ controls the economy for their own good, believe that a ‘deep state’ is embedded within the government and believe that the mainstream media is ‘deliberately’ misleading us.” Such voters “are more prevalent among younger people, those with lower incomes, those with less formal education, and among racial and ethnic minority groups. In other words, it is groups who have historically occupied a tenuous position in the American socio-economic structure.”

The most intensely partisan voters — very strong Democrats and very strong Republicans — are the least anti-establishment, according to Uscinski and Enders:

Those on the extremes of partisan and ideological identity exhibit lower levels of most of these psychological predispositions. In other words, extreme partisans and ideologues are more likely to express civil attitudes and agreeable personality characteristics than less extreme partisans and ideologues; this contradicts growing concerns over the relationship between left-right extremism and antisocial attitudes and behaviors. We suspect this finding is due to strong partisans and ideologues being wedded to, and entrenched within, the established political order. Their organized, relatively constrained orientation toward the political landscape is built on the objects of establishment politics: the parties, party elites and familiar ideological objects.

That, in turn, leads Uscinski and Enders to another contrarian conclusion:

We find that an additional “anti-establishment” dimension of opinion can, at least partially, account for the acceptance of political violence, distrust in government, belief in conspiracy theories, and support for “outsider” candidates. Although it is intuitive to attribute contemporary political dysfunction to left-right extremism and partisan tribalism, we argue that many elements of this dysfunction stem from the activation of anti-establishment orientations.

One politician whose appeal was similar to Trump’s, as many have noted, was George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, who ran for president four times in the 1960s and 1970s, openly using anti-Black rhetoric.

Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Pomona College, cites Wallace in an email:

There has always been a sizable bloc of American voters eager to support candidates articulating explicit appeals to out-group antipathy. Segregationist George Wallace, for example, won approximately 13.5 percent of the national three-way presidential vote in 1968.

Republican candidates before Trump used so-called dog-whistle themes designed to capitalize on white racial fears, Wasow pointed out, in such a way that they

could appeal to those animated by racial threat while also holding together a larger, winning coalition. That Trump was able to campaign like Wallace yet build a winning state-level coalition in 2016 like Nixon is remarkable but not obviously repeatable on a national scale, even by Trump himself (as evidenced in 2020). Regionally, however, Trump’s style of overt ethnonationalist rhetoric will likely have enough support to remain highly viable for congressional and state-level candidates.

In their July 3 paper, “Partisan Schadenfreude and the Demand for Candidate Cruelty,” Steven W. Webster, Adam N. Glynn and Matthew P. Motta, political scientists at Indiana University, Emory and Oklahoma State, explore “the prevalence of partisan schadenfreude — that is, taking ‘joy in the suffering’ of partisan others.”

In it, they argue that a “sizable portion of the American mass public engages in partisan schadenfreude and these attitudes are most commonly expressed by the most ideologically extreme Americans.”

In addition, Webster, Glynn and Motta write, these voters create a “demand for candidate cruelty” since these voters are “more likely than not to vote for candidates who promise to pass policies that ‘disproportionately harm’ supporters of the opposing political party.”

In response to my emailed inquiries, Webster answered:

Schadenfreude is a bipartisan attitude. In our study, the schadenfreude measure ranges from 0-6. For Republicans, the mean score on this measure is 2.81; for Democrats, it is 2.67. Notably, there is a considerable amount of variation in how much partisans express schadenfreude: some express very little schadenfreude, while others exhibit an extraordinary amount. Those who identify as a ‘strong Democrat’ or a ‘strong Republican’ tend to express greater levels of schadenfreude than those who do not strongly identify with their party.

The kind of pain voters would like to see inflicted on their adversaries varies by ideology, partisanship and issue. Webster argues that “among those who accept the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring and is attributable to natural causes, over one-third agreed that climate change deniers ‘get what they deserve when disasters like hurricanes make landfall where they live.’”

Democrats and Republicans express two very different forms of schadenfreude over the Covid-19 pandemic, and Trump often capitalized on this. Trump’s supporters, Webster wrote,

thrived off his willingness to upset the “right” people, which is certainly an aspect of schadenfreude. In many ways, Trump’s supporters were (and are) motivated by their frustrations over a society that appears to be moving away from one that they desire. So, this makes Trump’s willingness go “against the grain,” so to speak, an attractive feature.

Webster went on:

Democrats experience schadenfreude when individuals do not follow CDC health guidelines and get sick from the coronavirus. In a similar manner, Republicans tend to express schadenfreude when people lose their job due to businesses following government regulations on the economy during the pandemic.

Along parallel lines, Christian Sebastian Parker, a political scientist at the University of Washington, wrote me:

Trump stoked anger. Anger is typically a reaction to perceived injustice and threat. Action to correct the perceived injustice, and to neutralize the threat, is the general behavioral response. Trump’s “surprise” victory in 2016 is, at least in part, a response on the part of the reactionary right to recover from the ‘injustice’ of having a Black president, and to neutralize the threat associated with perceived social change.

Trump appealed to voters, Parker continued, who “wanted ‘their’ country back, so they mobilized in an effort to make that happen.” These kinds of appeals can work in both directions.

“In some of my own research,” Parker wrote,

I showed that when we primed Black people with material that depicted Trump as a threat to Black people, they were far more likely to report their intention to mobilize in the 2020 election than those who didn’t have this prime. In short, explicit appeals are the order of the day.

From one vantage point, there is a legitimate argument that Trump has not really changed the Republican Party.

In an article in Vox in August of 2020, “Trump was supposed to change the G.O.P. But the G.O.P. changed him,” Jane Coaston, now the host of The Times’s podcast “The Argument,” wrote:

The Trumpification of the Republican Party was not the remaking of the Republican Party into a populist outfit. Instead, it was the reshaping of Trump into a mainline Republican, one who values the “beautiful boaters” over working-class voters whose politics were more heterodox than any observer realized back in 2016. The desire for populism Trump observed was real, but he didn’t believe in it. As one conservative pundit told me, while Trump exploited a vacuum in conservative thought, “what’s so sad is that he never fulfilled or developed it.”

More recently, my Times colleague Alexander Burns wrote on July 4 about “the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.”

The electorate, Burns noted,

is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.

All true. But at the same time Trump has mobilized and consolidated a cohort that now exercises control over the Republican Party, a renegade segment of the electorate, perhaps as large as one-third of all voters, which disdains democratic principles, welcomes authoritarian techniques to crush racial and cultural liberalism, seeks to wrest away the election machinery and suffers from the mass delusion that Trump won last November.

Regardless of whether Trump runs again, he has left an enormous footprint — a black mark — on American politics, which will stain elections for years to come.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.