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Paul Waldman (born February 27, 1968) is a liberal American op-ed columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect , as well as a contributor to The Week and a blogger for The Washington Post 's Plum Line blog.
Waldman was formerly a senior researcher at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. [1] From 2004 to 2009, he worked at Media Matters for America. [2] In 2020, referencing a Ta-Nehisi Coates article that described Donald Trump as "the first white president," Waldman has proposed that Trump, drawing on decades of rhetoric that amplifies "whiteness as an identity and locus of oppression," has utilized white identity as a foundational aspect of his presidency. [3]
The effect is to increase the salience of whiteness as an identity and locus of oppression, an idea that came to fruition in Trump's presidential candidacy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, Trump is "the first white president," in that he is the first president who elevated white identity to such a central place in his political project.