Donald Trump has crossed the 200-day mark since his inauguration. It was a raucous run-up to this milestone, and true to his campaign style, the president has aggressively behaved as the race-baiter-in-chief.



He encouraged police brutality at a speech in Long Island, New York, using gang violence as a justification for draconian immigration crackdowns, and a few days later announced support for a Senate proposal to restrict legal immigration into the US.

Then came a firestorm over a New York Times article that suggested the Department of Justice (DoJ) will target diversity programs in colleges and universities for investigation. The DoJ contests the story, but at least one Republican political consultant, Brett O’Donnell, believes the attack on affirmative action can gin up the base through stoking racial divisions: “This touches a lot of issues and talks right to the folks who look at college admissions and believe slots for their kids are being taken, whether it’s by illegal immigrants or by other groups.”

There is no doubt Trump’s base is predominantly white and, generally speaking, it is hurting. Take college and jobs, for instance: according to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings gap between those with and without a college degree is the widest ever recorded.

Those with college degrees earn 56% more than those without college degrees and have seen a 3% drop in income since the Great Recession. This has hurt workers of all races, and people of color earn less than their white counterparts. But for white residents of the US, a greater barrier to college is cost, not increased diversity at their preferred schools.

A recent study by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (reported in the Atlantic) found that students in families earning around $160,000 or more can generally afford about 90% of the more than 2,000 colleges studied. Students from families earning $69,000 or less can only afford 5% or less of those same colleges.

Thus Trump ignores even the interests of his struggling voter base by not tackling the real challenges at play. That is why it is unsurprising that Trump’s support appears to be shrinking among white Americans who need more educational and job opportunities.

Depending on the poll, he is hovering at 43% popularity among that segment of the population. That is significantly lower than average of 62% for presidents at this point in their tenure. Barack Obama was at 58% at this time in 2008.

According to Republican public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies, even Trump’s base is eroding among likely midterm election voters in the key swing states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In April, 35.3% of voters found Trump “strongly favorable”, but only 28.6% do now. FiveThirtyEight agrees: “Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support.” That is because he is not offering real solutions to their problems.

Rolling back diversity admissions programs won’t get Trump’s base the access to higher education they want and deserve, since it’s about cost more than competition. What it will do is perpetuate an already cavernous income gap between black and white Americans that has persisted since 1980.

Only 4% of black students who graduate four-year institutions attended elite institutions, compared to 9% of white college graduates. And 59% of black students completing four-year college degrees are at the bottom ranked schools, not the top. Not only is challenging diversity programs not a good solution for the alleged problem, it also misses the point: race discrimination is still real.

Shockingly, black graduates of elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Duke were only as likely to get responses from employers as white graduates of much less prestigious state colleges, such as the University of California, Riverside, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This means white students are more competitive than their black counterparts at lower-tier schools for reasons that can only be described as racialized.

Trump’s base will not get the education or jobs they need, nor will anyone else, by blaming immigrants and minorities. Traditional scapegoating arguments ring hollow as well. Violent crimes are at historic lows. Since the 1990s we have seen a 50% drop in crime, according to data the FBI collects from over 18,000 jurisdictions.

MS-13, a dangerous gang that has terrorized communities in the US and comes from the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, represents just 1% of US gang activity. Furthermore, only 0.02% of all unaccompanied minors apprehended at the south-west US border since 2011 were either suspected or confirmed to have ties to gangs in their home countries.

This brings us to Trump’s support for a Senate bill – pitched as a way to “protect” American jobs – that would limit legal immigrants of African, Asian and Latino origin, many of whom are trying to join siblings, grown children or parents already in the country. Here, as with fears about diversity in higher education, the needs of working-class white Americans are real, but diversity is not the problem.

In a 550-page report released in 2016 by 14 scholars, including economists and demographers (reported in the New York Times), there were found “little to no negative effects [of immigration] on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term”.

Children who are Latino, Asian, black and Native American will soon make up half of public school grade students, with or without Trump’s divisive rhetoric and destructive policies.

The president recently proclaimed himself as presidential as Abraham Lincoln. Yet he continues to silence his “better angels”, preferring a race wedge over universal solutions. Doubtless his base will leave him bereft if he continues to presume their needs are met by failing to solve their problems and instead by expanding intolerance and discrimination.

Maya Wiley is the Senior Vice President for Social Justice, Henry Cohen Professor of Urban Policy and Management at The New School