If Trump fails to revive the American dream, then what?

President Trump’s inaugural rant prompted me to reread Let America Be America Again by the black poet Langston Hughes, who is said to have been an inspiration to Martin Luther King. Writing in 1936, Hughes spoke for the immigrant and ‘the poor white, fooled and pushed apart’ as well as his own people, ‘the Negro bearing slavery’s scars’: together, the millions of Americans ‘who never got ahead’ and have nothing for their efforts ‘except the dream that’s almost dead’. The poem is the authentic cry of the economically disappointed who feel themselves exploited by ‘that ancient chain of profit, power, gain’. It ends with a rallying call: ‘Out of … the rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,/ We the people must … make America again!’

But that’s not what came to pass, Trump supporters argue, which is why 63 million voters bought his snake oil of nativism, jingoism, anti-establishment bile and fake empathy with the ‘poor white’ whose experience he has never shared.