15 Part IV Introduction: Language and Trump’ s White Nationalist Strongman Politics Janet McIntosh In spite of his reality-defying claim that he is “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered” (Lopez 2019), Trump’ s tendency to exclude, caricature, and scapegoat non-Whites has been widely documented. A 2019 Atlantic article (Graham et al. 2019) summarizes just a few chapters of his racist past and present, including his anger toward people of color in competition with him (as when he opposed casinos run by Native Americans in the early 1990s–2000s), his anxiety surrounding upwardly mobile African Americans (e.g. on The Apprentice), his equivocations about neo-Nazis (see Hodgson, this volume), his administration’ s flagrant neglect of Puerto Rico compared with Houston when both were slammed by hurricanes, and his generally “very Aryan” view of race. Trump repeatedly lifts from the Fox News playbook of racial ideology, presuming that people of color hold themselves back with their own dysfunctions; that Whites are the victims of reverse racism; and that minorities who criticize government policy are “ungrateful” or “unpatriotic” (Waldman 2019). He has pandered time and again to White supremacists, repeatedly denigrated people of color, and reliably attracted voters who score high on measures of racism (Lopez 2019). Though he may deny it, his statements and actions cumulatively point toward the notion that “making America great again” means bringing it back to an era of more overt White supremacy. And whiteness, for Trump, is mapped onto the English language and particular ways of speaking it, while White superiority is encoded in his word choices, his metaphors, and his mockery. Several chapters in this section address the way language can be weaponized in service of Trump’ s authoritarian White nationalism. This section introduc- tion furnishes some broader context from linguistic anthropology to address how racism and xenophobia often play out in Trump’ s linguistic tool kit. 15.1 The Politics of Language Varieties In human semiotic systems, language varieties – a linguist’ s phrase for what people usually call “languages” and “dialects”– often stand for something much more than themselves. This is a classic finding in the study of language 217 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.016 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Brandeis Library, on 01 Dec 2021 at 00:39:51, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,