Looking Beyond Trump

Editor’s Note: This is adapted from an address given by Mark Weber on May 31, 2025, at a conference organized and hosted by James Edwards in Greenville, South Carolina. We hosted a lot of perspectives about Trump. Many of them were much more critical than my own.

Our host has brought us together this weekend to do more than diagnose and explain what’s gone wrong, or to call out those who are responsible.The focus of this conference, he explains, is “on how to effectively leverage the opportunities created by Donald Trump’s re-election,” and to “capitalize on the changing political climate.” Well, doing that demands an honest and realistic assessment of Trump’s career, the MAGA movement that grew from it, and the Trump presidency.

Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to power has been, above all, an expression of deep and growing unhappiness among Americans with what’s become of our country. The Trump-MAGA movement has given voice to the pent-up rage of millions – above all, white middle class and working Americans – who have been ignored and belittled by their political leaders, and who have been made to feel like strangers in their own country.

His success is the result of the mounting disappointment and anger at the ever more obvious failure of the establishment political parties and their leaders, who have held power for decades, and of those who have supported them in the mass media, in Hollywood, in business, and in school and college classrooms. Trump’s ascent to the White House is both a symptom and an accelerator of the breakdown of the liberal democratic order – and the ideology on which it is based – that has prevailed in our country and in western Europe since the end of World War II.

Trump has performed a great service by shaking things up. He has pushed Americans to acknowledge uncomfortable realities that those in power have wanted everyone to ignore. He has pressed Americans to re-consider such important issues as birthright citizenship, and “affirmative action” policies and other programs that discriminate against white citizens – issues that those in power had long regarded as “settled” and not open to question.

While acknowledging positive features of the Trump-MAGA movement, honesty compels us to also frankly acknowledge the very real limits of what that movement and the Trump administration can actually accomplish.

Donald Trump and MAGA movement leaders claim that America is no longer the great country it was and should be because it has been wrecked by evil people. To “Make America Great Again,” they believe, does not require a revolution. It requires only getting rid of those bad people who have done so much to wreck the country. In keeping with its character as a reactionary protest movement, Trump and MAGA Republicans focus on identifying their enemies and removing them from power and influence.

Trump and his colleagues and supporters are clear about who and what they do not like, and want to sweep away. They seem certain, for example, about what books they believe Americans should not read. Accordingly, the Trump administration has been busy removing from libraries books that foster anti-white attitudes, and notably those that promote “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” However, Trump and the MAGA movement seem to have no idea of just what books should be in libraries, or that Americans should be reading.

That’s because Trump and the MAGA movement has no coherent, self-consistent worldview or historical outlook of its own to replace the ideology that has prevailed in the US for the past 80 years, and which has inexorably brought us to where we are today. As a result, the Trump-MAGA movement has no clear concept of the future other than a vague vision of an America that, once again, is “great” and “winning.”

So often we have heard Republican politicians and commentators tell us that the miserable conditions in US cities – the decay, crime and disorder of Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and so on – are all because … the mayors of those cities are Democrats. Do they – does anyone – actually believe such nonsense? So often MAGA Republicans tell us that the Democrats are the “real racists,” and insist that, “we” should all think of ourselves simply as human beings and “Americans” – and that our goal is, or should be, a color-blind, non-racial America.

MAGA Republicans complain about “identity politics,” calling it “divisive” and “racist.” It’s difficult to believe that those who make such claims are sincere, given that Trump’s own campaign routinely practiced “identity politics,” with election appeals to blacks, Hispanics, and Jews that promise benefits to members of those racial or ethnic groups.

As part of his effort to win support from black voters in the 2020 election campaign, Donald Trump issued his so-called “Platinum Plan,” which promised that a second Trump administration would make “Juneteenth” a national holiday, and would set up a range of new federal programs that, he claimed, would “increase access to capital in Black communities by almost 500 billion dollars,” thereby “creating 500,000 new black-owned businesses.” When President Biden later made Juneteenth an official federal holiday, Trump claimed credit for it because, he said, he was the one who made the idea “very famous.” During the 2024 presidential election cycle, both the Trump and Harris campaigns made “identity politics” appeals to Jews, running television ads that explained why each candidate was best for Jewish interests.

Although Trump and MAGA Republicans reject anti-white policies, and the outlook on which those polices are based, they do not have an explicitly pro-white outlook. Instead, they believe, or pretend to believe, that race does not matter – that America is so “exceptional” that this country is somehow immune from the realities of biology, of history, and of life itself.

Those who are serious about our country and our future, though, cannot afford to close their eyes to things as they really are. Work and sacrifice based on anything other than a frank and realistic understanding of the great challenges we face is a waste of time and effort. When we carefully consider just what can and should be done, we must be clear-eyed and honest about how profoundly the drastic racial-cultural transformation of our country over the past 80 years has changed everything. To be blunt, the Trump-MAGA diagnosis of what’s wrong with America, and therefore what’s to be done, is woefully inadequate.

In the years just after the end of World War II, the US population was some 90 percent European American. Whites were even a majority in every large US city. Today, only a handful of large US cities still have a majority white population. As everyone here is very aware, the US population is, or very soon will be, a majority non-white. MAGA Americans believe, or at least hope, that in spite of the radical cultural-racial change in the US population since the 1950s, President Trump will somehow restore the united, purposeful USA of a bygone era.

Some of us here this weekend are old enough to remember how many millions of white Americans and so-called conservatives put great hope in Ronald Reagan, another Republican leader whose slogan in the 1980 presidential election campaign was “Let’s Make America Great Again.” In his acceptance speech at the Republican Party national convention that year, Reagan spoke about welcoming Haitians to the US, because – he explained – America is a providentially chosen country for people everywhere who yearn for freedom. “Can we doubt,” he said, “that only a divine providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breath freely: Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and of Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.”

I remember the joy of victory shared by millions of white Americans when Reagan was elected president a few months later, and their happiness during the eight years he was in the White House – lifting spirits with inspiring, patriotic rhetoric about American greatness and exceptionalism. Like Trump, Ronald Reagan ignored race – and, not surprisingly, the country’s demographic and cultural de-Europeanization continued during the Reagan years at a brisk pace.

However thrilling election victories by politicians who promise a “great America” may make many of us feel, that is not what really matters. What’s important is not victory for a candidate or a party, but solid, purposeful policies for our people based on a coherent worldview grounded in reality.

During the 2024 election campaign, many MAGA voters were encouraged by the prospect that a second Trump administration would deport one or two or even ten million illegal immigrants. Most Trump supporters today still hope that sweeping policies and measures by the new administration might somehow turn back the clock, and restore an America that once was. The sober truth, though, is that even if all illegal immigration to the US stops tomorrow, and every illegal immigrant is deported or leaves the country, the racial “third-worldization” of the US – the de-Europeanization of the country – will continue, even if at a slower pace.

In his inaugural address in January, and in similar remarks on election night in November, Trump made a point of expressing thanks for the support he had gotten from “African Americans, Hispanic Americans, [and] Asian Americans.” He made no mention of the much more important, indeed, decisive support he received from white Americans. The reason for this “oversight,” if you will, is not ignorance.

To talk explicitly about white American voters, or white American heritage, or white American history, is somehow to detract from the comfortable but delusional assumption of so many of our people that white America is America, and that blacks, Hispanics, and so forth, are more or less adjunct or peripheral population groups that “we” should either ignore or try to uplift and fit in to “our” great country.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, nearly all Americans understood and acknowledged the obvious reality that race matters. Today that’s no longer true. For more than 80 years, white Americans have been subjected to a systematic, organized campaign of social conditioning that promotes a poisonously distorted portrayal of life and history, through television and Hollywood movies, in newspapers and magazines, and in school and college classrooms, all bolstered with reassuring but toxic platitudes by compliant politicians. This well-organized campaign has succeeded in persuading most white Americans – including millions of MAGA-Trump supporters – that race does not or should not matter.

In his inaugural address of January, Donald Trump promised, “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.” His administration, he said, will “bring back hope, prosperity, safety, and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed.” He promised not only that “we will bring prices down,” but that “the American Dream will soon be back and thriving like never before.” If Trump’s vision of the future is valid, then we – that is, all those who understand that race is not merely a social construct – have been wrong.

It’s possible to ignore reality – but it is not possible to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. What that means is that the real-life consequences of what the US has become – racially, culturally and socially – impose unequivocal limits on the actual, lasting achievements of a Trump government. Within ten years, and most likely before the end of this second Trump administration, it will be obvious, even to most of his supporters, that the MAGA vision of a “Golden Age” for America is delusional.

In coming years, demographic reality will dispel what’s left of the naïve hopes of a Trumpian restoration, and the foolish view that the realities of biology, history, and life can be ignored. The consequences of this process will also inevitably force a shift in attitudes by white Americans about themselves and their country, especially among younger men and women who have no memory of a time when the US was still an overwhelmingly white nation.

As white Americans become an ever smaller part of the US population, our people will be increasingly forced to acknowledge their declining influence and status, and will be compelled to face the consequences of living as a dwindling minority in the country that was once theirs. Only then will large numbers of white Americans begin to organize in earnest to battle for the rights and interests of our people.

A great change in attitudes among white Americans is coming. As history shows, such a change can happen quickly when the new outlook is in line with sensibilities that already exist, but which have been dormant and unexpressed. Where conditions like those in today’s America existed in the past, similar shifts have taken place quickly.

The history of our own country provides an instructive example. When prominent Americans from the 13 colonies met together in late 1774 as the “Continental Congress,” they still regarded themselves as loyal to Britain and the English king. Their identity was still first and foremost that of British subjects. At that time, George Washington – a delegate at that assembly – was “well satisfied’ that independence from Britain was not “desired by any thinking man in all North America.” As late as July 1775, that is, even after the bloody clashes between colonial militiamen and British soldiers in Massachusetts at Lexington and Concord, as well as at Bunker Hill near Boston, the Continental Congress denied “any designs of separation from Great Britian and establishing independent states.”

But attitudes about identify were changing. By the summer of 1776, a view that just a year earlier had been considered unthinkable was now acceptable, at least to a determined minority of white Americans. In July 1776, the Continental Congress delegates ratified and signed the Declaration of Independence, and thereby proclaimed a new identity for the white people of the former 13 colonies. It was only after five years of suffering and privation in a bloody struggle that often seemed hopeless, and in which support from a foreign country proved decisive, that British military power was broken, thereby securing the future of the new republic.

More importantly, all those who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, or who debated and signed the US Constitution of 1787, unanimously regarded the new country as a white people’s republic. This new identity took hold quickly because it fit well with changed conditions, and because it expressed a latent but suppressed sensibility.

In spite of decades of egalitarian propaganda and social conditioning, most white Americans today still have an instinctive sense of “whiteness.” On a certain level, most white Americans already realize, however unclearly, that there is no secure and hopeful future for themselves and their children and grand-children in a non-white, Third-world society. That dim awareness is manifest in how we live and act. For decades, white Americans have shown in their behavior that they prefer to live among, and associate with, people who are like themselves. Even those who claim to love “diversity” move away from neighborhoods that become too non-white.

All the same, most white Americans today are still loyal to the USA, and hope that somehow this increasingly diverse and divided entity can still be held together. For most of our people, a future without the USA is simply unimaginable. That’s understandable, of course. After all, for most of the nearly 250 years that the US has existed, this country’s saga has been a historically unparalleled one of prosperity, innovation, expansion, hegemony, and success.

For reasons already mentioned, only a minority of white Americans today are more concerned about the future of our people than they are about the future of the United States. Because most white Americans today more or less accept that forthrightly affirming our heritage and identity is somehow shameful or embarrassing, they are not yet ready to support candidates who openly defend White interests. As a result, not a single openly, unapologetically pro-white public figure holds elected office right now – at least on the federal level – anywhere in the country.

When we give serious consideration to just what can or should be done in political life, obviously we must take into consideration the actual feelings and attitudes of white voters. The confusion of most white Americans about what it even means to be “American,” together with their ambivalent feelings about race and identity, impose constraints on just what is possible, and not possible, for pro-white candidates. For the foreseeable future, pro-white candidates must be careful about how they express themselves, making sure not to be so explicit that they alarm voters who are afraid of “racism,” but not so timid that they betray our communitarian interests. All the same, the election record of the Trump-MAGA movement shows that millions of white Americans will vote for candidates who openly reject anti-white egalitarian policies, and thereby defend, at least implicitly, white community interests.

As the demographic trends of the past half-century continue, and as ever more white Americans better understand the consequences of those trends, they will be steadily more willing to support candidates who appeal for votes with a white version of “identity politics.” Ever more white voters will be motivated to support candidates who not only highlight and call out the deceit and hypocrisy of the politicians, educators, media masters, and business leaders promoting DEI, “affirmative action” and similar policies, but who also explain just how such policies, and the outlook behind them, harm the interests and future of white Americans.

The outreach of pro-white candidates should be cogent and reasonable, and appeal to a sense of justice and fair play. Such candidates will be all the more effective when they appeal to voters not merely with negative messaging about their opponents, but when they also present positive imagery of our own people, and messaging that inspires hope for a better future for our children. Successful pro-white candidates and activists must learn to be flexible and adaptive in tactics, while always firm and steadfast in principle. That’s not easy to do. It requires patience, self-control, and discernment – virtues that normally come only with experience and age.

In this time of accelerating change and looming challenge, our most pressing task must be to awaken the suppressed but slumbering self-awareness, confidence, and latent strength of our people. Our hopes and efforts must be directed, first and foremost, not to propping up and trying to save the multi-cultural, multi-racial USA. Instead, our focus should be on the well-being and future of our people. In this struggle there will be no easy, “quick fix” victory. In fact, the battle will become more intense after Trump is gone, and the MAGA movement is history.

Happily, there are already encouraging reasons for hope and confidence.

On the intellectual front, we are already prevailing, even if that’s not yet widely understood or acknowledged. Our most formidable adversaries in the battle for ideas are not neo-Marxists or dreamy utopians, but rather the neo-conservative and neo-liberal apologists for the prevailing democratic-capitalist order. Although they defend a System that is still powerful and entrenched, they are very much on the defensive because that order is ever more obviously failing.

These defenders of what they call “democracy” want to suppress and ban popular political parties that they say are not “really” democratic. These champions of “free speech” and “tolerance” ban books, websites, and podcasts that they regard as offensive or hateful. They denounce ethno-nationalism in Hungary and Poland, but defend it in Israel. Their slogans, arguments and ideas are lackluster and uninteresting. No wonder they are increasingly regarded – especially by younger men and women – as ineffectual hypocrites.

In this struggle, we can also take heart from the important work that’s being done to lay a foundation for ultimate victory. Especially encouraging is the rise in recent years of an ever-growing number of capable, smart, and articulate younger white activists, publicists, writers, and organizer. With each passing year, these younger men and women – in our country and overseas – are turning out ever more, and ever better quality, videos, podcasts, websites, essays and books.

In this great, existential struggle of our age, our guiding spirit must not be loathing or hatred of others, but an abiding loyalty, love and devotion for the heritage and future of our own people, sustained by our vision of a secure, hopeful and durable future for our children and for generations of our people not yet born.