What the future holds for Donald Trump and the Republican Party is remarkably murky. Was Trump an aberration who capitalized on his fame and notoriety to win the White House, or was he a continuation of the shifting politics of race and American political parties? After Trump’s presidency, will the Republican Party continue the explicit racist appeals he has made for years, or will these types of appeals be off-limits to mainstream politicians again?

We will not have definitive answers until the next several years play out. But a partial answer can come from understanding how Trump emerged as the Republican candidate in 2016 and how he was able to win in the general election. There is, understandably, a large and growing literature on this topic, but Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram’s Hard White: The Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics makes a vital contribution to understanding where the political influence of Trump came from and, as a result, what we can expect to happen in the near future. Fording and Schram make the compelling case that Trump is both the beneficiary of changes in the white nationalist movement that occurred before he ran for president and the kind of charismatic leader that the white nationalist movement needed to expand its influence into mainstream politics. As such, the book places Trump’s use of racist appeals and his presidency in a broader political context.

Their work is firmly grounded in the social movement literature arguing that the appearance of the Tea Party movement and Trump provided the two key structural changes in American politics that facilitated the mainstreaming of racism. They demonstrate their argument by integrating several distinct datasets on macrolevel processes, such as data on white nationalist group activity and online racism, with microlevel data regarding citizens’ racial attitudes and political participation. Fording and Schram clearly see the big picture of how all these moving pieces fit together, leading to the unmistakable conclusion that Trump benefited from a preexisting set of white racial extremist views and activated these beliefs among people who typically abstain from politics. Trump’s ability in the 2020 election to increase his support via the mobilization of new voters seems to further validate this conclusion.

A book like Hard White faces an inherent tension between trying to explain a specific election and developing a more general theory about how politics functions in America. Fording and Schram effectively maintain a balance between writing a book about the 2016 election and writing a book about how racism has become mainstreamed in our politics. Obviously, one take is that these are really the same question. Trump was elected because racism was becoming mainstream, and racism became mainstream because Trump’s rhetoric and actions normalized racism. Decaying social norms do not get a lot of direct attention in the book, but there is enough evidence to suggest that Trump’s ability to make social norms regarding race ambiguous helped legitimize the current white nationalist turn. Overall, Fording and Schram provide much-needed detail into the precursors of Trump and do so in a way that is well grounded in our broader understanding of social movements, voting behavior, attitude formation, and how information (and misinformation) is spread.

Fording and Schram begin their analysis by focusing on the nature of whites’ attitudes on race. They argue that the key to understanding how racism became mainstreamed is to think about racism as consisting of whites’ animosity toward African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. Thus, racism for them is not entirely about “race” but is a concept that emphasizes animus toward ethnic and religious minorities too. They build a measure of this concept, which they call “outgroup hostility,” that is conceptually similar to beliefs like ethnocentrism, social dominance orientation, or right-wing authoritarianism but is operationally and empirically distinct.

Equally important is their finding that outgroup hostility, rather than white ingroup identity, matters more for the mainstreaming of racism. Fording and Schram diverge from recent works such as Ashley Jardina’s (2019) White Identity Politics by positioning outgroup hostility as the key driver of Trump’s success. Rather than the result of a white backlash, Trump’s victory was a result of polarization in outgroup hostility. But this polarization is characterized by more whites rejecting outgroup hostility (p. 175), which may have roots in the idea that white identity can evolve into an antiracist commitment (see Janet Helms, “An Update of Helms’ White and People of Color Racial Identity Models,” Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, 1995)

The mainstreaming of racism, however, does not originate with Trump. Instead, Fording and Schram posit its origins within the white nationalist movement. The third and fourth chapters of the book follow the history of the white nationalist movement and how it co-opted the Tea Party. White nationalists used the anger directed at President Obama as an opportunity to enter into mainstream politics. Tea Party organizations became a way for white nationalists to participate in mainstream politics behind the cover of economic and taxation concerns. But the Tea Party movement was short-lived, losing much of its momentum by 2016. Fording and Schram suggest that this is because it lacked a charismatic leader—that is, until Trump. They show that the Tea Party provided a base of supporters for Trump and that Trump provided a leader the base could rally behind. Rather than tease out the precise causal sequence of these events, they appear to view these relationships as more symbiotic.

The second half of the book focuses on how Trump’s racist appeals were instrumental in his victory in 2016. They devote chapters to (1) the role of conservative media in creating an echo chamber for Trump, (2) how low-information voters responded to Trump’s appeals, and (3) documenting the predictive power of outgroup hostility in voting for Trump. Racism played a central role in Trump’s campaign and a powerful role in white Americans’ votes. Despite a decline in the levels of white racial conservatives and extremists (p. 34), the activation of these attitudes by Trump’s campaign was enough for him to eke out a win in the Electoral College. Each of these chapters is compelling, and they combine to form a full picture of how the electorate reacted to the changes the authors outlined in the first half of the book.

Any book that tries to take as broad an approach as this one will raise as many important questions as it answers. The strength of this book is in making the explicit connection between the politics of racism during the Obama administration and how Trump campaigned in 2016—leading to what the authors refer to as the mainstreaming of racism. Fording and Schram are clear and transparent in their discussion of how they measure outgroup hostility but are somewhat conceptually fuzzy about what exactly is meant by mainstreaming for the mass public. Political elites, particularly Trump, are using racialized political narratives that activated white racial extremists. But the authors’ data show that outgroup hostility declined throughout the time of their surveys. Trump did not make racism more popular, and a majority of the public is not espousing racially conservative or extreme attitudes. One could argue, then, that outgroup hostility is not mainstreamed in the mass public. Racial attitudes were more predictive of turnout and vote choice in 2016 than other cycles, but it is unclear whether this was enough to be considered mainstream.

A related question is why was Trump not penalized for his racist remarks when such comments only resonated with a “narrow slice” of the public (p. 119)—particularly during the primary when partisan-based judgments would be minimized? Was his ability to mobilize new racial extremist voters enough to offset the loss of racial moderates, or are we underestimating the extent to which racism appeals to rank-and-file Republicans? Further study of how norms operate in such a context could help answer these questions.

Some readers may also take issue with the measurement of outgroup hostility, particularly when trying to explain political outcomes beyond Trump. The measure itself combines the standard racial resentment items, feeling thermometers for immigrants and Muslims, a question about the number of immigrants who should be allowed into the United States, and an item that asks how likely it is that immigrants will take jobs away from people already here. Given the emphasis on Trump’s rhetoric in helping forge this outgroup hostility, we assume that attitudes toward Asians, particularly Chinese people, might also coalesce into this outgroup hostility if adequate measures of this sentiment existed.

By thinking about outgroup hostility as a more generalized attitude, Fording and Schram’s approach contrasts with recent works such as Nazita Lajevardi’s (2020) Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia, Yan and Galea’s “Racism and the COVID-19 Epidemic” (American Journal of Public Health, 2020), and our research, which emphasizes the importance of animosity toward specific outgroups. Fording and Schram’s approach makes sense given that the focus of their study is on the broader shifts in mainstreaming the ideas of white nationalism and the rise of Trump, rather than specific policy debates. However, this raises a broader concern that the field needs to continue to wrestle with. It would be worthwhile to develop a broader theory about which types of concepts (group-specific or general) matter when and why. This is, clearly, outside the goals that Fording and Schram set, but their work does provide more evidence of the necessity of answering such questions.