In President Donald Trump’s first term, we got used to hearing “dog whistles.” Trump’s populist nationalism was riven through by messaging that implicitly demonized minorities and migrants. Undocumented arrivals were “rapists,” inner city youths were “rabid” animals, neo-Nazi marches included “very fine people,” and some countries were simply, in Trump’s derogatory parlance, places teeming with excrement. The president brought into the mainstream a style of rhetoric brimming with contempt that had previously been kept at bay on the fringes of U.S. political life.
