No serious person can trace Trump’s origins as an American political force to anything other than racism. Pick a point on the Trump timeline and you’ll find his keen sense for stoking white resentment. He has no other skills, and to the extent he governed, he did so as a bigot.

And that was okay. His voters would have accepted Bernie Sanders’ economic agenda if they believed that his socialism was restricted entirely to people who looked like them—people who “deserved” it.

White people as a whole in 2020 showed no sign of changing their minds about the man who counts birtherism as his first political masterstroke. The current state of tent-pole institutions of white identity make this clear:

American Christianity is captured by Trumpism to a degree that can scarcely be overstated. A manifestly irreligious racist won over the majority of American Christians with next to no effort.

Law enforcement, an American institution as inextricable from racism as Trump himself, has, under this president, abandoned all pretense and cemented itself not as as a public-service career path, but as a political identity defined by an entitlement to anti-Black violence.

And similarly, Trump finished the decades long GOP project of bending “suburban” into an identity defined by racial resentment and not by geography.

You may also find the evidence in what white people—and no other group—willingly sacrificed in this election: science, economics, international preeminence—even their health was not a price to dear to pay. White people sacrificed all this without an apparent second thought.

And Trump never delivered on any promise to white people other than the main one: make life harder for everyone else. All of this was apparent in the election he won, and white people affirmed it in the election he’s now lost.

So the idea that there’s bridge building to be done toward or common ground to be found with or empathy owed to Trump voters (I am deliberately not saying “by Biden voters” because the idea of any equivalence between the two is risible) is entirely disingenuous.

It’s nothing more than Trump supporters demanding everyone else agree that there are, indeed, fine people on both sides.

But there aren’t really two sides here.

Exactly four years ago, a white acquaintance on Facebook chastised me for taking my son to a post-election protest. He was sure I was overreacting and that in a year or two I’d see that.

At that protest, we carried signs that read “Black Lives Matter” and chanted “Immigrants Are Welcome Here” and “Love Trumps Hate.” A group peacefully stopped traffic on the interstate that was created by bulldozing an historic Black neighborhood.

Yesterday, protestors drove into the city to rally in front of the governor’s mansion near my home. They brought guns and Trump flags and they chanted about voter-fraud conspiracy theories.

If you see those as two sides, then god help you, because I can’t.