"No one's looking out for the white guy anymore." [View all]

[HughBeaumont]

Are Trump supporters THIS willfully stupid?

Rhett Benhoff, a middle-aged white man at a December Trump campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, said discrimination against whites is "absolutely" real.

"I mean, it seems like we really go overboard to make sure all these other nationalities nowadays and colors have their fair shake of it, but no one's looking out for the white guy anymore," he said.

Among Trump supporters, suspicion and anger toward the Black Lives Matter movement run deep. These people say the group's name and slogan seem to convey that black lives are more important than white lives.

"I think it's bulls---," said Ziegler, the 61-year-old diehard Trump fan who attended his Columbus, Ohio, rally. "All lives matter. You know this is bulls---- about black lives matter -- doesn't all lives matter?"

It's the last word in Trump's now-ubiquitous campaign slogan -- "Make America Great Again" -- that seems to have touched a nerve. Recent polls show that white people increasingly feel that the American Dream is out of reach, and a sizable group of white Americans feel they are subjected to racial discrimination -- a perception of the white experience shared by few minorities.

Almost half of whites -- 47% -- said in a November CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation survey that there is discrimination against whites, far more than the share of blacks and Hispanics who said the same.

And just over half of whites said they did not support the Black Lives Matter movement. Whereas 86% of blacks said the justice system was tilted toward white people, only 48% of whites said the same.

At the Trump rally in Myrtle Beach, where signs that read "silent majority" dotted the crowd, Patricia Saunders told CNN that Trump is speaking directly to a segment of the population that feels left behind and marginalized.

"White Americans founded this country," said Saunders, 64. "We are being pushed aside because of the President's administration and the media."

Ah, yes, Patty . . . . because those six corporations that own all the media have totally been on the President's side these past 8 years.