A quicker way to make the same points I made below: Trump is about race like ISIS is about religion. I'd quibble only about the 9-11 hijackers, and their one bit of indulgence before death.

This 2 minute video by @mehdirhasan paints a more accurate picture of ISIS than 95% of bloated western thinkpieces. https://t.co/sa2OvqI9Vn

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) March 15, 2016

Corey Robin: The Definitive Take on Donald Trump
Jamelle Bouie: How Trump Happened

For Americans opposed to Trump, it’s tempting to believe that his base is a shrinking part of America; that these are the death throes of racial reaction. Eventually, goes the thinking, they’ll fade from view too.

That is wishful thinking. America is a diverse country. But it’s still a predominantly white one, where a Trumpist movement can still encompass millions of voters. And “eventually” might be a while. In the space between now and then, Trumpism—the potent mix of open prejudice, nationalist aggression, and heterodox economic policy—could thrive. In fact, it likely will, since the trends that produced Trump—a brittle economy, an ailing white working-class, an insecure white middle-class, a rising nonwhite population, political gridlock, and growing minority political power—are ongoing.

Corey Robin is still a broken record, and still an idiot. The civil rights movement was a Burkean movement of ministers and their congregants. Bouie is one of the new generation of buppie commentators, black neoliberals. Coates and Bouie replay the reactionary cynicism of Clarence Thomas to an audience of white liberals as opposed to white conservatives.
repeats and repeats and repeats

NYT: Donald Trump’s Tampa Office Is an Unlikely Melting Pot
William Grieder in the Nation: Trump can win against Clinton by running to the right and left of her.
Also, Thomas Frank, below.
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Few outright condemnations of the protestors invading the pitch at Trump's event in Chicago.
He's being blamed.  People who whine about whiners demanding "safe spaces" aren't whining.

Leiter: "Chicago protesters chase the fascist narcissist from the city. Good for them."

Free speech means there are no government restrictions on fascist speech. It means also that people don't have "the right" to shut down an assembly of fascists, that people in Harlem don't have "the right" to chase a man walking down the street in a KKK robe, and that Jews in Skokie don't have "the right" to threaten a man in a Nazi uniform. The same rules apply to black men who wander into the "white part of town" at three in the morning and women who jog alone at night in Central Park.  All of the people above are "within their rights" in wanting to be left alone.

The calculations of real politics, as function and not ideal, practice and not theory (and of participants not philosophers), includes accounting for prudence.

People are cruel, but Trump's not the fool who's stumbled onto the wrong street, he's the asshole who's gone too far. A GOP official said the leadership see his rallies as "absolutely toxic". He's destroying the Republican party and replacing it with himself. In this country, that leads nowhere.
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Four years later, the last sentences surprised me.