Take “The Trump Effect: An Experimental Investigation of the Emboldening Effect of Racially Inflammatory Elite Communication” published earlier this month by four political scientists.

The authors, Benjamin Newman, Jennifer Merolla, Sono Shah, Loren Collingwood and Karthick Ramakrishnan, all at the University of California-Riverside, and Danielle Casarez Lemi of SMU, wrote:

We find that exposure to racially inflammatory statements by Trump caused those with high levels of prejudice to be more likely to perceive engagement in prejudiced behavior as socially acceptable.

In other words, if the president of the United States denigrates Muslims, or Hispanics, or African-Americans, then anyone can.

Significantly, Newman, Merolla and their colleagues determined that

“the magnitude of this effect is enhanced when exposure to inflammatory speech by Trump is coupled with information that other political elites tacitly condone his speech,” as leading Republicans have done through their continuing acquiescence.

While Trump’s rhetoric improved his prospects in 2016, Merolla wrote by email, in 2020 the result may be mixed:

When individuals experience feelings of anger in relation to the political environment, they are more likely to participate in politics so I suspect that it did help drive increased turnout. However, his rhetoric has also led to increased anger on the other side of the aisle, so it has also likely driven higher turnout on the left, especially during the 2018 midterm election.

A forthcoming paper by Desmond King and Rogers M. Smith, political scientists at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, “White Protectionism in America,” makes a strong case that Trump, unlike his Republican predecessors in the White House, has gone far beyond rhetoric and token gestures to substantively address the concerns of his anti-immigrant and socially conservative supporters.

King and Smith catalog in great detail Trump’s success putting in place policies

favored by racially conservative Americans but with a new focus on active white protection, rather than simply colorblind efforts to constrain positive governmental actions. Trump has fanned the anger of many white supporters convinced that post-1970 federal policies have unjustly favored people of color.

Trump has fueled this anger and solidified his support among “his anti-immigrant and socially conservative supporters,” combating this “alleged white victimization,” King and Smith argue, by requiring:

protectionist measures including tolerating racial profiling in policing and reversing some extant civil rights policies; subverting others through deregulation or neglect; and favoring measures which go beyond colorblindness, such as stop-and-frisk practices and demands for identification triggered by racial and ethnic identities, as well as anti-Muslim immigration restrictions.

In an email, Smith wrote that he and King “can’t estimate how effective the white protectionist message will be for Trump,” but

You don’t need to specialize in quantitative analyses of elections to know that the cult of personality Trump has inspired means that he is a far more effective voice for this view than anyone else in American politics. Having him at the top of the ticket this time around has to help in advancing white protectionist messages and policies successfully.

Now let’s look at some of the Democratic and liberal thinking focused on undermining Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy.