Let’s begin by looking at the four groups called out in the comment, and ask why they’re particular targets right now.

Muslims

Ever since 9/11, the US has been simmering in a stew of “Muslims are evil, they want to destroy America.” This was made easier by the fact that many Americans had never met a Muslim before; it was also very politically expedient for many people to encourage. The net result is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become profoundly vitriolic, and often violent, across the country, only becoming more so over time. Trump has been an active supporter of this from the beginning, so it’s not surprising that they’re among his first targets.

Latinos come from a different angle, one more tied to nativism: they’re the current version of those “damned immigrants” that Americans have a history of blaming for things. (As were the Italians, the Irish, the Germans, etc., in the past) In particular, Trump’s campaign was based on exacerbating this: going to areas where there was a steady collapse of the long-term economic outlook, and telling people that it was because of deals with China and Mexicans coming in and stealing people’s jobs. The rhetoric was never very consistent; immigrants are simultaneously lazy and stealing all the jobs. (cf also Exodus 1:9–10, 5:6–9, 5:17; some rhetoric never changes) But it’s extremely politically expedient to encourage as well: people who are blaming immigrants for their economic problem can vent their anger against them, and will not be asking too many questions about (e.g.) why the factory is now fully automated, or full-time employees with benefits were replaced with part-timers, or things like that.

(cf also European policies about Jews from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern period. There is nothing new under the Sun.)

Isn’t this a cute puppy? Cute puppies really help deal with this sort of thing. This one comes from @CuteEmergency.

Black people are a third angle still. The history of racial hatred there is, of course, the history of America as a whole; there’s no brief summary. But the reason that it’s flaring up right now is, I think, tied to the Black Lives Matter movement. In particular, whenever black people show up asking for something — or worse yet, demanding something — there’s a very strong backlash of the form “Everything was fine before you started stirring up racial tensions!” Reading American newspapers (not just Southern ones!) from the 1960’s is sickeningly familiar; the articles could have been lifted word-for-word.

The conflict with police is particularly significant, because police in much of the country have historically had their primary role being to keep the races “in their place.” The primary reason that people see America as not considering black lives to matter is, after all, that when a black person is shot, people look for justifications as to why it was justified, while when a white person is arrested (to say nothing of shot!), people look for the similarities between themselves. A good example pairing is Brock Turner and Trayvon Martin. Turner was arrested after being caught in the act of raping a woman behind a dumpster; two people saw him, chased him, and held him down until the police arrived. Convicted, he was sentenced to six months, with the judge not wanting to harm this young man’s future; news stories about him invariably described him in their headlines as a “Stanford swimmer.” Martin, on the other hand, was a high school kid coming home from buying some candy when he was shot to death by a man who was “patrolling his neighborhood.” His news coverage focused a great deal on how his sweater made him look threatening.

All of which is to say, the things this movement are questioning are extremely tied with people’s perception of danger and the social order: they’re saying, in essence, that the protection of white society from black threats, real and imagined, which has been such an implicit part of the role of police for so long, is instead something the police — and by implication, white society — should be censured for. Which makes the emotional stakes very high, and is why we get strange responses like “Blue Lives Matter.” (Were people ever saying that they didn’t?)

The black and trans communities are actually similar in this respect, I think. The origins of violence against trans communities are another giant subject that would take a whole book to address properly; it would talk about things like “social role essentialism” and “purity taboos” and “masculine homosexuality taboos.” But we can summarize that as saying that the rates of murder and sexual assault of, and suicide by, trans communities are through the roof, and have been for a long time.

But the reason that trans issues are suddenly more salient is, I believe, that they’ve been getting more attention. The increased visibility of trans folk in the media, for example, and the fact that more people are simply likely to know someone who is trans, puts them in roughly the same position that LGB people were in in the mid-90’s. And like with the BLM movement, there’s a certain response of “why are these people asking for something from me?”

Ultimately, that’s part of a broader pattern: when people are already stretched to their absolute limit emotionally, with financial stresses, family stresses, medical stresses, lack of a clear future stresses, then hearing anyone else ask for something — even if that something is as simple as “the right to walk down the street without being murdered” — feels like an added imposition. And that can lead to a backlash, not just from people who are inherently racist or the like, but also from people who aren’t and just don’t want yet another thing dropped on their plate. But when that’s a backlash against a basic request to be allowed to live (or go to the bathroom, or any other basic aspect of human life), that takes on a much nastier property.

(See this previous article for more on the theme of emotional exhaustion)

So that’s my top-level perspective on why these particular groups are at the top of the list right now. There are other groups which are perpetually in waiting: I suspect that we’ll see Jews, Native Americans, and academics rising up the list over the next few years as well. (Jews, because a fairly old-school anti-Semitism maintains its currency in a lot of far-right circles, especially ones which are currently in the White House; watch for talk of “global special interests,” which is a favorite euphemism in those circles. Native Americans, for the same reasons as black and trans folk, if anything happens to raise their profile. And academics, because they’re part of those “elites” which are a convenient target for blame, and are also likely to be vocal opponents of the regime.)