The ballot of Donald J. Trump equally 45th president of the United States came equally a shock to many—peradventure even to the billionaire himself. Across the U.S. and around the world, people asked the same question: What just happened?

Here was a homo with no political nor military experience; who had angered but virtually every minority grouping ; whom a dozen women had defendant of sexual assault —and yet millions of people had just elected him to the highest political office in the Usa.

As exit polls showed, Trump didn't win among poor Americans, every bit was expected; the majority of voters (52 percent) with a total family income of less than $50,000 in 2022 really voted for the Autonomous nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Trump voters tended to be older (53 percent of people aged 45 and over voted for him), well-off and white. According to the leave polls, 58 percent of all white voters chose Trump at the voting booth, while but 21 percent of non-white voters cast their ballots for the Republican nominee.

The biggest issue for Trump voters—ahead of strange policy, the economy or terrorism—was immigration, leave polls showed, with 84 per centum of Trump voters maxim that the regime should deport undocumented migrants rather than give them the gamble to apply for legal status.

Analysts say Trump'due south success amongst white voters is partly attributable to his tapping into concerns nigh clearing and a feeling among many voters that the U.Due south. should be a white, Christian land. "It's similar everything he said hitting the correct nationalistic buttons," says Allyson Shortle, assistant professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma.

Like other experts who spoke to Newsweek , Shortle explained that the concept of nationalism is circuitous, and non easy to define. "It's important to note that racism and nationalism are these related only distinct components," she says. A person tin can strongly identify with their nation but not forth ethnic lines.

"Some people remember about it every bit an ideology, a motility, or an attitude—but some research, including my own, views nationalism every bit part of a person's social identity," writes Kathleen Powers, assistant professor in the section of international affairs at the University of Georgia, in an email to Newsweek . "When people identify with a nationality, they have an thought well-nigh what defines the prototypical or archetypal group member. In short, they conduct a picture of what it means to be an American.

"That prototypical American," Powers adds, "might be defined in relatively inclusive terms, like a person who respects political institutions, or in more than exclusive terms, similar someone who is role of a Judeo-Christian religion, speaks English, or is a fellow member of a certain racial group. Certainly, some people ascertain the prototypical American as white, Christian, and/or born in the U.S."

And if that'south your conception of what information technology is to be an American, Powers writes, and so anyone who deviates from the norm is either not a truthful American, or is a poor version of one.

What figures prominently in how ordinary citizens define what it is to be an American, Shortle says, is the notion of the U.Due south. and its peoples every bit a Christian nation. (The Pilgrim Fathers, who founded what came to be the United states of america, were Christian dissenters fleeing religious persecution in Europe.)

Even today, religious nationalism remains stiff among a significant proportion of U.S. citizens. On September 29, a poll of 4,000 Americans—which Shortle helped organize—establish that 43 percentage of respondents thought that the arable natural resource in the U.S. were a sign that God wanted America to pb the rest of the globe. Sixty percent of those surveyed believed that the U.S. holds a special identify in God'due south program. (Not all of the people polled were Christian or even religious).

According to Shortle, inquiry shows that religious nationalism features particularly heavily among Trump's supporters. It is role of the reason, she says, that Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S. played and then well. It appealed to "this narrow vision of a Christian America," Shortle says.

But past targeting Muslims and undocumented migrants, Trump besides played upon certain desires to view the U.S. as a "white" country that was nether threat from not-white immigrants. Many of his supporters, Shortle says, interpreted Trump's entrada slogan—Brand America Bang-up Again—as "Make America White Again." (Shortle points out that given the U.S. was start home to Native Americans, and so was partly built by black slaves, the idea of returning to "whiteness" is a fallacy.)

Trump's comments that United mexican states was sending "its most unwanted people into the U.S., in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists," resonated with some of his supporters who feared that America was condign overrun past immigrants. On November 1, the Crusader , the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan, threw its support behind Trump with a forepart page article headlined "Brand America Dandy Once again." The commodity read: "America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great."

"Throughout the U.S. people say they want to go back to the good onetime days, just that'south very much a racialized idea," says Jacqueline Gehring, acquaintance professor of political scientific discipline at Allegheny Higher. "Trump's whole slogan, his whole campaign, threw dorsum to a fourth dimension when ethnic minorities weren't in powerful positions or weren't equally successful as working- and middle-course whites. When things were great for some people, they weren't smashing for others."

Barack Obama
U.S. President Barack Obama earlier a NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland, July 8. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Office of what led to Trump's rise, Gehring says, was a growing frustration among some people only at having a black president. "In that location has been a backlash," she says. "Obama is seen as having emboldened black people, having led to the rise of groups like Blackness Lives Matter and I think it makes many white people experience uncomfortable."

Gehring rejects the idea that Black Lives Thing'southward being is tied to a failure by Obama to accost or improve race relations. "I call up things have been bad for black people for a while in terms of police brutality," she says, noting that an absence of federal figures on police use of fatal forcefulness makes this difficult to quantify. "Having a black president has created energy in the black customs. In that location's a sense that if we have a black president we tin can end the trouble of police force brutality too."

Sara Wallace Goodman, associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, agrees that Obama'south 2-term presidency might have pushed voters toward Trump. "There is a feeling in the U.S. that there has been an excess of liberalism," she says. "People want to take back what was rightfully theirs and for some that includes taking dorsum the colour of the presidency."

The belief that the U.S. should be a white, Christian nation is not new. What is new was how Trump exploited that belief past repeatedly playing on people's prejudices toward Muslims and immigrants, portraying them equally corrupting invaders.

In recent presidential elections, no candidate has so explicitly used nationalistic discourse as a method to proceeds votes. Neither has any president-elect received and then many messages of support from Europe's far-right leaders, as Trump did. For these politicians, the president-elect is proof that an ballot tin can be won partly through stoking nationalistic fervor. Marine Le Pen, leader of France'southward far-right National Front, told the BBC on Sunday that Trump'due south win has improved her chances of existence elected French president next yr. Trump, she said, has "made possible what had previously been presented every bit impossible."

And with presidential elections due to take identify in 5 European countries adjacent year, other far-right leaders will exist hoping for a surge in support—and to reap the benefits of the Trump effect.