… Relative to where American politics stood before his rise, Trump’s campaign polarized America more by class and gender than it did by race. And then, by jettisoning much of the populist economic agenda he campaigned on, Trump’s actual presidency has made class less important and gender more essential to understanding how Americans divide.
This doesn’t mean that race isn’t enduringly important to these divisions; the fact that a minority of minority men seem more blasé about his bigotry than you might expect does not mean that Trump is actually building a pan-racial coalition. But if you’re looking at what Trump has directly changed, who seems distinctively offended and energized by his provocations, white-brown-black differences aren’t where the action is; instead, it’s with the large female backlash that may be poised to swamp the male backlash that helped make him president. CONT.
Ross Douthat, New York Times