Donald Trump was everyone’s monster. “Monster” comes from monstre and monstrum, a portent, warning, or revelation — as in “demonstration.” After Trump’s general election loss, everyone wants to know, or thinks they know, what his dishonest, chaotic, and bigoted administration reveals about the country that elevated him.
He has been influentially called the country’s “first white president,” on account of being the first of forty-four white men in the office to be elected, in some sense, as a repudiation of a black president. By that standard, he is certainly the first male president, in that he was the first to defeat a woman for the office. Each formulation captures something about the white grievance politics that Trump fomented on his path to the White House and his efforts to keep it. Each taps into a view about the importance of racial hierarchy and misogyny “in the DNA” of American life, as a strut of other parts of our social order, made explicit under pressure from demographic change and demands for genuine gender equality.
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