A big real estate New York businessmen / reality TV star (certainly of the New York "establishment" for decades) entered the Republican primaries. Donald Trump

A big real estate New York businessmen / reality TV star (certainly of the New York "establishment" for decades) entered the Republican primaries. Donald Trump was a nobody. Then, he started talking about walls around Mexico and banning all Muslims. This made him very popular in many places. This ended up carrying him all the way to the presidency. That is a reason why there's so much talk about this. It's a mistake to think that this is election was just economics. A lot of Trump's support came from very well off people after all. Having said that I do agree with you a fair bit. For a start, "racist" is a bad term. That implies outright hatred, which in my viewpoint is very minority; "cultural anxiety" is a better phrase to me, future insecurity compounded by tribal instinct. EG: It's not "I hate Mexican people", it's "Mexican people took my jobs". Those two sentences are not equivalent. This too is not the only reason people supported Trump either (anything from nostalgia to agreement with policies to Hillary hatred played a role). On the flip side Bernie Sanders showed that non-culturally-anxious economics played well with many Trump voters too. But that initial data point still is troubling to me. And it's less on the people that voted for him and more on the candidate himself. Trump was able to exploit this, and in the process made current culture a lot more toxic.