In 2016, I couldn’t fathom a Trump presidency. When it happened, I found relief in Clinton winning the popular vote by two million. The outcome, I thought, was more a product of an archaic electoral system than a reflection of national disposition. That changed on November 5, 2024. Trump won the popular vote, drawing votes from demographic groups across the board and picking up support in nearly every part of the country. All this was done as he stumbled, fumbled, fumed, blustered, and impugned to the end.
Nothing Trump did during the election was socially acceptable or even politically astute. Yet none of his actions or words stymied his support. If anything, it helped. Trump voters said they wanted lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes—and no wars. They haven’t gotten any of these, yet a large segment continue to support his every move. Their support goes deeper than policies and outcomes (although both have given many supporters pause). The support is rooted in what Trump represents and the warped understanding of American history many of his supporters hold.
What happened on November 5 and what’s happening now domestically and internationally have deep roots in a white narcissistic view of American history. As Rajeev Balasubramanyam wrote, “…white narcissism rests on favourable comparison with other races …” When those societal structures and ideologies that support white ascendancy are challenged, there is white backlash. The trigger for our current white narcissistic moment, or the white-lash as Van Jones described it, was the election of Barack Obama and the myriad rights movements’ long-in-coming ascent to political, economic, and social power. The structures and ideologies were starting to crumble. It became too much for too many White folks.
As Balasubramanyam noted, “Donald Trump is the standard bearer for white rage, a man. who has ensured that white narcissism will endure at least a little while longer even as it faces its greatest ever threat.” What Trump has fostered is not a blip in the bend of M.L. King’s " arc of the moral universe.” Although it may ultimately bend toward justice, the arc does not bend freely and there are no guarantees it will bend at all because counterforces, like MAGA, are always at work. King and other Civil Rights leaders knew this. They understood the history they were confronting. James Baldwin, reflecting on that history, wrote, "We are in deeper trouble than we think: The trouble is in us." Read trouble as white narcissism. And, yes, today, Spring 2026, we are in deeper trouble than we ever have been.
Whether you believe he has awoken that trouble or simply rode its latest wave, Trump has masterfully honed a message of bigotry and white supremacy that is as old as the United States. In his second term he has turned personal grievances into an elixir to fuel the wrath of white narcissists. Historically, there has always been people eager to do this.
I believe that because white narcissism or trouble is so ingrained in our heritage, so in us, many people who voted for Trump don’t consciously recognize it. What they know are recollections of past times that proffer a nation built by the hands of (White) settlers and industrialists, a place where one’s destiny was always and firmly in one’s own hands, where individual initiative wins out, and any blemishes on our heritage that may have existed have been washed away by American’s unending progress,…until (insert whatever challenge to white narcissism you believe gives cause for MAGA).
For white settlers, there was never a question of the legitimacy of their claims to land and dominion over others. We know the stories of Native American genocide, of African enslavement, unpromised Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and of xenophobia and manifest destiny—of Chinese immigrants mistreated, killed, and denied citizenship, of Japanese citizens stripped of all they owned and interned for years, and of Irish, Italian, and many others discriminated against until they could grab the reins of power and, in turn, discriminate against others—Latinos, Asians, etc., until, in fact, they were seen as White.
Our history is pockmarked with white genocidal acts big and small and with terrorism aimed at individual bodies and entire communities. There are reasons events like the Tulsa Race Riots, the Osage Indian murders, and hundreds of other acts of genocide and destruction aren’t part of our official national story. They exist in broad daylight (if not in our history textbooks) for us to discover, if we really wanted to know the truth of us. Big and small, they reveal the human cost of white narcissism.
Yet, every time we tear the fabric of the false narrative of White narcissism, every time we build an Underground Railroad Museum, stand against ICE or with LGBTQ+ citizens, or elect an African American president, a segment of the nation mobilizes with murderous glee. Now, we see it in efforts to eliminate African American history, ban books, strike out at voting rights, equal opportunity programs, and reproductive rights, and terrorize entire communities. For the first time in a few generations, the full force of the American government, under the control of white narcissists, has turned on immigrants, on anyone who openly supports immigrants, and well, on anyone who is not them.
This should not, however, be read as a tale of misery and lost hope or even white condemnation. My feelings here are not directed at any one person but at a way of being or way of conceptualizing the United States, the world, and who we are as a people. While it runs deep in our national bloodline, white narcissism is not the only component of our national body. Our origins bequeath us a will to resist that can be as powerful and more enduring that any inherent perennial prejudicial trouble we face. As a nation we have made civil rights progress and attained social and economic justice to a degree inspiring not because we stood as a nation but because individuals and groups stood against the accepted and often legislated inequities of our national birth. These individuals and groups wrapped themselves in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as shields against despotism, racism, and rancid nationalism. It is these individuals and groups and not the government that bends the arc toward justice.
Every day since November 5, 2024, I remind myself of those whose lives are testaments of the possibility of radical transformation. I try to find those individuals who throughout history and today have weathered and beaten back White narcissism and bigotry. I look for the Frederick Douglasses, Elizabeth Cady Stantons, Madonna Thunder Hawks, Harry Hays, and millions of others, known and unknown, whose successes are the foundation on which we stand today. The freedoms and rights we fight for today are the ones they won for us in their battle against white narcissism. It’s a testament to their successes that we can continue the fight. Anyone awake to our history knows who we elected on November 5. We know what he stands for and who he represents. We also have a history that shows us what we do.