DAVID BROOKS:

No, not with Donald Trump. 

White identity politics has been his calling card for a long, long time, maybe stretching back generations of the Trump family. 

The Institute for Family Studies did this study asking how many people, how many Americans actually sympathize with what the alt-right stood for, what the people in Charlottesville stood for.  And they identified three core beliefs. 

The first was, do you have a strong sense of white identity, do you have a belief in the importance of white solidarity, that all white people should stick together, and you have a sense of white victimization, that whites are often the victim of discrimination? 

And 6 percent of Americans share those three beliefs.  And so that's pretty much a core set of people who have high — one would say, a high degree of white identity, verging into racism. 

And so that's a group of people who can be whipped up.  And then there's a large group that share one of those things. 

But, to me, Donald Trump's main failure is constantly whipping up that sense of white identity.  Not many even Republicans 20 years ago thought that being white was a strong part of their identity.  But now it's like 55 percent.  And so he has stirred that up. 

And then the second problem is, you just can't have a party that's basically all white, because when you overlay our racial problems with our political problems, you get instant poison. 

And so the failure to do anything about that is by itself a gigantic problem.