Trump-led movement centered in victimhood sees Biden's speech as attack
In both literal and figurative terms, “make America great again” is about reversion. It’s about how America now is not good but America then was. The most important word of the four is “again”: what was once, can be again.
Supporters of former president Donald Trump share a broad understanding of the America to which they want to return. In March 2016, a poll conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News yielded results that, at the time, were startling: The better predictor of support for Trump in the Republican primary wasn’t whether voters were struggling economically but whether they strongly felt that White Americans were losing out to non-Whites. Other polls reinforced this idea: Members of the heavily White Republican Party saw Whites and Christians as embattled in modern society.
Even in April this year, polling determined that Republicans saw those two groups as facing more discrimination than Black or Jewish Americans. This sentiment is why toxic ideas such as “great replacement theory” land on fertile ground. The victimhood was often framed in the context of deviant “elites” who controlled media and the economy, but the concerns were often expressed outside the context of class.
What Donald Trump promised his supporters was that he would fight back in the face of these and other perceived embattlements. He would be the shield standing between them and an America that had become more diverse and more liberal in recent decades; what’s more, he would return fire. A group used to unchallenged dominance was now perpetually aggrieved, the nation in which they grew seeming to turn away from them. But here came Trump, ready to make America great once again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/02/biden-trump-speech-republicans/
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