No one can erase or redo history. No one can give a personal mea culpa for something that happened before they were born. To be anti-racist is not to attempt those things that are impossible on principle. It is simply to care about people today, to acknowledge history as needed, and to try to move forward together, making the most of the resources we have.
I moved my original post here: Some Voted for Trump 2016 Saying It Was the Best Economic Choice
I've also found other relevant stuff.
Karoline Leavitt’s ‘Incredibly Dangerous’ Rant About Democrats Draws Instant Backlash: The Trump White House press secretary's remark was condemned as "grossly dark” and “f**king dangerous." Lee Moran, HuffPost, Oct 17, 2025
An update: Here's one explanation of why the Republican Party promoted Trump.
Angie Maxwell wrote in the Washington Post on July 26, 2019 that, during the last four decades of the 20th century, "Republicans fine-tuned their pitch and won the allegiance of Southern whites (and their sympathizers nationwide) by remaking their party in the Southern white image." However, after Bill Clinton's two-term presidency,
...the GOP recognized that it needed a new appeal, one that portrayed Democrats as a threat to the brand of Christian values Republicans had been championing for two decades. This time the party worked to reframe its positions on a host of domestic issues, ranging from health care to foreign policy, into matters of religious belief. By making the full spectrum of political debates about fundamental values, Republicans forged an unbreakable bond with Southern white evangelical voters, who went from social conservatives to all-out Republicans by the 2000s.
* * *
Understanding the full range of the GOP’s efforts in the South since Nixon clears up any confusion as to how Trump, a man whose personal life seems to violate every moral precept avowed by most Southern white conservatives, secured their unyielding allegiance. Trump has wielded the GOP’s Southern playbook with precision: defending Confederate monuments, eulogizing Schlafly at her funeral and even hiring Reagan’s Southern campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Trump, in many ways, is no anomaly. He is the very culmination of the GOP’s long Southern strategy."
It wasn't just because they were worried about being poor (and merely happened to be white). This, from Issac J. Bailey, Why Didn't We Riot?: A Black Man in Trumpland (New York: Other Press, 2020):
Imagine that black people were the main reason Farrakhan had become president of the United States. Now imagine how the (mostly white) mainstream would have explained such a result. They would not have made excuses for black voters. They would not have said it was reasonable for black voters to have put an anti-Semite in charge of laws that would affect Jewish Americans because of the “economic angst” black people have felt forever in this country. They would not have told Jews to empathize more with the black voters who elevated open, brazen anti-Semitism into the most powerful office in the world. ... I cannot imagine voting for a man like Farrakhan, then demanding that my Jewish friends and neighbors understand my choice. I’d be embarrassed. I’d feel like a fraud...
He also wrote:
In one instance, even when a politician literally spoke fondly of the term white supremacy, some journalists had a hard time labeling the comments as white supremacist. That was particularly odd, given Representative [Steve] King’s disturbing racial history, making it less likely it was just a slip of the tongue. In another, journalists could not bring themselves to grapple with the reality of white supremacy even as a large number of white people tried to make one of the most well-known white supremacists in U.S. history a senator three and a half decades after the Civil Rights Act became law. No wonder the journalistic default was “economic angst” even as Trump rose to national political prominence primarily because of his advocacy for a bigoted birtherism conspiracy theory.
Look here:
"One of the first things Donald Trump did after arriving at the White House in 2017 was make it easier for employers to get away with wage theft.
Congressional Republicans had just passed a bill repealing a federal rule that barred firms from getting government contracts if they had an egregious history of stealing workers’ wages. Trump signed the legislation despite having run a presidential campaign all about lifting up the working class.
It was the first of many Trump actions that benefitted employers at the expense of everyday workers, including those at the very bottom of the economy.
Over his four years in the White House, Trump tried to make it easier for companies to hide workers’ injuries, to avoid paying low-wage employees for their overtime, to take a slice of their tips, to misclassify them as “independent contractors,” and to prevent them from unionizing and bargaining collectively. He nominated a fast-food executive to be the nation’s top workplace regulator, in charge of making sure workers come home safe and get paid what they’re owed.
It was a record anyone could reasonably expect from a hotel mogul who refused to divest his business holdings when he assumed office."
— Trump Said He Would Fight For Workers. He Fought For Business Lobbies Instead.: As president, the hotel mogul took the reins off employers at the expense of everyday workers. Now he wants another crack at it. Dave Jamieson, HuffPost, Dec 29, 2023
Hmm:
"There was some other reason to vote for him, that allowed you to overlook these facts?
Save it, please. The reason really doesn't matter. It was a bad reason. We've seen this before. History has a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because tehy hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is 'Nazi.' Historians study and learn from their motives, but there is a broad understanding: their motives aren't exonerative. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to what came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding."
— A.R. Moxon, "Sky," December 2016, reprinted in Very Fine People, 2024
"If you lied about us [Appalachians], you could lie about him [Trump]. If you can lie about him, then there’s no reason to listen to a goddamn thing you say. ... These people [Appalachians] believe the left is doing to him [Trump] what they perceive to have been done to themselves. Now, if you throw in the fact that Trump (and those like him) have repeatedly promised to bring coal jobs back to these people of Appalachia (particularly Kentucky), and thus preserve what they perceive as their way of life, and you get a recipe for a political power that cannot be dislodged by way of simply telling the truth."
— Coyote Wallace, Hungry Like Me: The False Prophets Of Poverty, Medium, Jul 29, 2024
Can you think of any right-wing policy that has improved anyone's life? Prison Culture, Bluesky, 2026
