'He immediately fit into that mold': How Southern politics gave us Trump

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U.S. President Donald Trump gestures, while he boards Air Force One, as he departs for New York at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., September 11, 2025. REUTERS Ken CedenoFile Photo

A panel of New York Tines writers from the American South say they see why President Donald Trump swept the Republican Party and retains his grip on moneyed interests and insecure white voters across the nation.

“It’s the first moment when I knew that ‘Never Trump’ was absolutely cooked,” said opinion columnist David French. “I looked at him, and I watched him operate, and I thought, ‘Oh, we’re done. He’s sweeping Super Tuesday,’ Why? Because he was a very familiar figure if you are somebody who’s paid attention to Southern culture and politics. He immediately fit into that mold of Huey Long, of George Wallace, of Edwin Edwards from Louisiana.”

“One of the things they learned is that the most efficient way to control the public’s attention was to just hammer these ideas that are deeply, fundamentally Southern,” said sociologist and writer Tressie McMillan Cottom. “These are ideas about race, obviously, and these are ideas about the inherent character of the nation, about who is included and who is excluded — not just constitutionally but whose citizenship is always conditional. These are all deeply and fundamentally Southern relationships of power.”

“That well never runs dry,” Cottom added. “I saw him live in Richmond, Va. I saw him in South Carolina. I saw him outside Atlanta. It was never a surprise to me that he spoke to Southerners. I was surprised by how many of us professional observers weren’t paying attention to how well he worked [in the South], because I thought that was a message for how well he was going to work across the country. … We all get a little Southern when this nation is going fascist.”

Columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out that Trump presents himself as “this perfect avatar of a kind of patriarchal masculinity” that can defy morals thanks to race and status.

Even elements of him that people joke, ‘If Obama had done that, people would have gone crazy’ — such as his multiple wives and multiple baby mamas — are, in this image of patriarchal white masculinity, Southern masculinity, not an issue,” Bouie said. “I think that particular image of masculinity is so deeply rooted in Southern culture, going back to the very beginning. And Trump just slots right into it, no problem whatsoever.”

Bouie added that Trump’s economic agenda, tailored after the South, melded with the G.O.P. as a national vision.

“[It’s a] region of weak or no rights for labor, of surveillance, of control, of low wages, of low services and of not just low taxes for those that already have wealth and privilege but essentially their right to dominate the entire economic and political sphere, unmolested by those they perceive to be below them,” Bouie said. “That is Trumpism. It’s important to recognize the way that this is not just a cultural thing that’s happening, that we’re looking at is the influence of an economic model that has appealed to political elites across the country, as it always has.”

“Every time a Southern politician goes out and they congratulate themselves about building the new car factory or the new battery maker in some rural part of their Southern state or municipality, what they have generally done is they have made a deal with either a national or a transnational conglomerate that says: You do not have to worry about unionizing,” said McMillan Cottom. “That is the deal. It is a continuation of the same idea.”

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