Prejudice ... Trump is less subtle. He has repeatedly made unconcealed use of prejudice against outgroups ranging from “dangerous” Muslims to Mexican “rapists.” His dedicated followers loved it; breaking with so-called “political correctness,” he blared openly what they had been saying privately. Not surprisingly, then, support for Trump correlates highly with a standard scale of modern racism (r = +.48; Van Assche & Pettigrew, 2016). And once again a European study is congruent with this American finding. Billiet and De Witte (2008) found that prejudice against immigrants was the single most important predictor of support for the far-right Vlamms Blok Party in Flemish Belgium.
Data from France’s 2012 presidential election strongly indicates that the racist National Front campaign of Marine Le Pen moved perceptions of social norms to the political right (Portelinha & Elcheroth, 2016). It appears that Trump, too, has eroded norms that proscribed intolerant speech and behavior. Racist graffiti, threats and hate crimes all rose sharply following Trump’s election victory (Reilly, 2016). Intergroup Contact ... A major means of reducing intergroup prejudice is through optimal intergroup contact (Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, 2011). So it is noteworthy that there is growing evidence that Trump’s White supporters have experienced far less contact with minorities than other Americans. For instance, Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016, p. 14) found that “...the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This finding remains true for both non-Hispanic Whites in general and for the smaller subset of White Republicans. And this lack of intergroup contact result emerges while controlling for dozens of other variables.
Consistent with this finding, these researchers also found that Trump support increased as an area’s distance from the Mexican border increased. Throughout the world, intergroup contact has been shown typically to diminish prejudice by reducing intergroup fear and inducing empathy (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008, 2011). Its extreme absence for most Trump fans is an important factor that has been virtually ignored in the post-election analyses.