White Trash

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency by tapping into something powerful: the identity of the "forgotten rural American." He spoke to working stiffs, provincial voters, those who felt left behind by a changing economy. He channeled their resentment toward educated elites, urban insiders, and professionals who seemed to look down on them. Trump's appeal wasn't about policy details. It was about cultural identification. He signaled through his language, his insults, his very posture that he was one of them.

But this strategy wasn't new. Trump joined a long tradition of American politicians who have wrapped themselves in the imagery of the common man while doing little to change the economic realities of poverty. Andrew Jackson complained about rigged elections in 1824. James Vardaman, known as the "White Chief" from Mississippi, attacked Theodore Roosevelt for embracing Black people and insulted his wealthy pedigree. These leaders used class symbols to appeal to the disinherited, the rural outsiders, those fearful of losing status.

Nancy Isenberg opens her book with this contemporary hook to show that the class divisions she's about to trace over four centuries are still very much alive. The white underclass that Trump mobilized—those without college degrees, those living in rural communities, those who feel invisible—has a history stretching back to the very founding of America.

Here's the central problem: America tells itself a story of equality. The American dream promises that anyone can rise through hard work. Anyone can climb the ladder. Anyone can make it. But Isenberg's research reveals something different. There has always been an entrenched class hierarchy in America, one that has systematically kept a segment of the white population trapped at the bottom. And this hierarchy has been justified through language, through stereotypes, through pseudoscience, and through the very land itself.

The story begins long before the American Revolution. America wasn't initially conceived as a land of opportunity. It was a place to send England's unwanted. The upper classes in England looked at the poor of London—the vagabonds, the paupers, the convicts—and called them "waste people." Waste. Human garbage. And where do you send waste? To a wasteland. America, in their eyes, was that wasteland.

The promoters of colonization, Richard Hakluyt and his younger cousin, never actually went to America. They depicted it as empty land, not yet put to commercial use. Idle people were waste. Undeveloped land was waste. The solution was obvious: send the waste people to work the waste land. America became one giant workhouse, a place where England's refuse could be made economically useful.

This wasn't a minor footnote in history. It was the founding vision. The poor were considered a different breed entirely—lacking human feelings, incapable of refinement, intellectually dull. They were described as insects, as monsters. They were expendable. And this attitude didn't disappear when the colonies became a nation. It evolved, adapted, and persisted.

Over four centuries, the names changed. Waste people became lubbers, rubbish, clay-eaters, crackers, rednecks, white trash. But the underlying message remained the same: these people are fundamentally different from us. They are a breed apart. Their poverty is not a failure of the system. It's a failure of their blood, their breeding, their very nature.

The American dream of upward mobility? Isenberg argues it's a myth for this class. The same families that were poor in the 1600s were often still poor in the 1900s. The same stereotypes that described indentured servants in Jamestown still describe trailer park residents today. Land ownership was the key to wealth and rights, and the landless were denied both. They couldn't vote. They couldn't hold office. They had no heirs to pass anything on to.

This history challenges everything we think we know about America. The founders who wrote about liberty and equality also wrote about "rubbish" and "the meaner sort." Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, had clear class biases that would shock most Americans today. Benjamin Franklin divided society into the "Better Sort" and the "Meaner Sort" and held the latter in contempt.

The white underclass has been stigmatized for centuries. They've been blamed for their own poverty. Their physical defects—caused by malnutrition, disease, and backbreaking labor—were interpreted as innate traits. Their living conditions—swampy lands, barren soil, isolated hovels—were seen not as the cause of their suffering but as proof of their inferiority.

So when Trump tapped into that vein of identity politics in 2016, he was drawing on something deep and old. The forgotten rural American wasn't a new invention. He was the latest iteration of a figure who has haunted American history from the very beginning—the waste person, the cracker, the redneck, the white trash. And the question Isenberg forces us to ask is this: If America has always had an underclass, if the American dream has always been a myth for so many, then why has no one ever demanded class justice?