Building a Coalition of Makers

Abstract

How was former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric crafted to appeal to a public that cross-cut class, racial, and ethnic boundaries? Significant scholarship has addressed the prevalence of racism and xenophobia in Trump’s language; nevertheless Trump was able to build a broad political coalition despite this derogatory speech. This article examines the ways in which Trump leverages producerist discourse by using race as a modality to construct a moral argument about the worthiness of the figure of the ‘maker’—the entrepreneurial protagonist of his rhetoric. Using a discourse analytic framework, it highlights how Trump uses stance to indirectly racialize and gender the subjects of his talk. The aim of this article is twofold. First, furthering scholarship on racialization and colorblind racism, it offers a discourse-based method for analyzing how an explicitly racist and exclusionary discourse can be interpreted by audiences as an inclusive one. Second, building on scholarship on Trump’s rhetoric, it shows how racialized, gendered, and anti-Semitic language is part of a discursive formation that makes the neoliberal ideal of producerism appealing to an expanding political coalition—paradoxically because it is a moralizing discourse that names outsiders. By analyzing stance-taking within discourses of ressentiment, it is possible to understand how racialized and gendered ideologies and anti-Semitism work together to simultaneously include and exclude non-White audiences.