Yet none of these points actually demonstrate that the dominating force behind the success of Trump’s campaign was white supremacy. The answer to Coates’s rhetorical question of whether Barack Obama could have gotten into office after a record of sexual assault is obviously no. But Coates does not contemplate the possibility that what made people willing to excuse Trump’s boorish behavior was not his whiteness, but his status as a celebrity entertainer in which his vulgarity was a widely accepted aspect of his persona. So when Coates asks whether we can “imagine a black felon running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well,” the proper parallel would be imagining a well-known entertainer whose social capital has accrued in the past few decades of television and digital media. Kanye 2020 anyone?

But the broader issue with the essay is that in the world that Coates has constructed for his reader, it is impossible for the source of the problem to be anything but whiteness, “that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.” Maybe the majority of Trump’s white supporters wanted to repeal the former president’s legislation because of actual policy disagreements; or, maybe they, like others, harbored deep dislike for Hillary Clinton. After all, Clinton lost critical states like Michigan and, as Omri Ben-Shahar wrote in Forbes, Clinton did so less because Trump gained new voters in these states than because registered Democrats did not show up on Election Day, possibly due to voter-ID laws and other factors. “Wisconsin tells the same numbers story,” he wrote. “Trump got no new votes. He received exactly the same number of votes in America’s dairyland as Romney did in 2012 … But Clinton again could not spark many Obama voters to turn out for her: she tallied 230,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012. This is how a 200,000-vote margin for Obama in the Badger State became a 30,000-vote defeat for Clinton.”

The distribution of minority votes tells a similar story. National Public Radio’s Domenico Montanaro points out that although Latinos made up a greater share of the electorate than in previous elections, “a significant share … went third party.” Indeed, that 6 percent may have made a significant difference. In North Carolina, black voters made up 20 percent of the electorate in 2016, a 3 percent decline from their share in 2012. Charles Ellison of the Philadelphia Tribune notes that between 2012 and 2016 there was “an alarming 11.4 percent reduction in Black votes.”

At the very least, this demonstrates that decreased democratic turnout had as much if not more of an impact in the election than Trump’s ability to rally supporters. Of course, none of this is to absolve Trump supporters for making unwise voting decisions, but if Coates wants to prove that white supremacy was the dominating force fueling the rise of Trump, he must demonstrate that all other possible motives are implausible—which he doesn’t.