THE TEA PARTY COMES HOME TO ROOST:

Trump ran to lead a party that had already accrued a base of racist Whites who liked that rhetoric. And he took the longstanding strategy that Atwater so bluntly laid out -- to couch racist politics in race-neutral terms -- and exaggerated it, often eliminating the subtext.

From claiming Barack Obama was born in Kenya to telling an African American audience to vote for him since they were poor and unemployed ("What the hell do you have to lose?") to fear-mongering about immigrants as "rapists" to retweeting White supremacists, Trump took the pervasive but often veiled racism of many in his party and pulled back the cover.

Many in his conservative audience, it turned out, loved it. After his election, he called the White supremacists at whose Virginia protest a woman was murdered "very fine people." For all of the hand-waving about the "economic anxiety" of the White Trump voter, it should have come as no surprise when researchers found that, actually, racial anxiety, xenophobia, and sexism were much larger motivators than finances.

Trump's presidency would be impossible without his base of overwhelmingly White, mostly male, less-educated and disproportionately older supporters. But he also wouldn't be in office without the great many Americans who claim to find him distasteful but voted for him anyway.

Many of them may say their moral compromise means more conservative judges (something Trump has indeed delivered), lower taxes (at least for the wealthy, it turns out), and an end of America playing global policeman (and, they complain, global bank). But they don't seem to think Trump's behavior in office is a deal-breaker: While the President's general approval ratings are in the toilet, 91% of Republicans approve of the way the President is doing his job, according to Gallup polling; just 4% of Democrats say the same.

Monsters don't make us; we make them. It is largely conservative White Americans, long subtly encouraged in their bigotries and entitlements by politicians seeking power, that made Donald Trump.

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