In the MAGA imagination, there’s much to fear in America. The movement’s leader, Donald Trump, bemoaned “American carnage” in his inauguration speech and spent the next four years telling his followers that their traditions, culture, and way of life were being threatened.

By what exactly? By who?

Trump’s articulated boogey man was often Democrats writ large. Fair enough. To be a politician is to be a finger pointer. In Washington, two plus two equals four and it’s always the other party’s fault.

But on Thursday, we received a reminder of the animating force behind Trump’s powerful brand of grievance politics: the browning of the population.

The 2020 census revealed that the U.S. has continued to become more racially and ethnically diverse. People of color represented 43% of the total population last year, up from 34% a decade prior.

Politicians like Trump know not to explicitly criticize this trend. But just because they’ve learned to (barely) operate within the strictures of acceptable discourse doesn’t mean their disdain for America’s increasingly dark melting pot isn’t obvious.

The evidence pointing to Trump’s racism is so well known that it’s hardly worth repeating. He revived his fledgling political relevance by claiming – without evidence – that the nation’s first Black president was illegitimate. Why? Because he was born in Africa. How clever.

You know the rest: Mexico is sending rapists; White Supremacists in Charlottesville had a legitimate point if only they didn’t shout ethnic slurs and murder a woman; CHINA, CHINA, CHINA is to blame for COVID-19, and hell, let’s say they stole the 2020 election for Joe Biden, too.

Trump is skilled at creating cover for supporters with the stomach to defend him. He’ll walk back an egregious comment – never as passionately as the original assertion – or he’ll pivot to some hyperbolic boast. Remember, no one has ever done more for black people.

And of course, to engage Trump is to invite media criticism. He opens his mouth and the countdown begins. Soon you’ll be hearing about CNN’s fake news agenda and those socialists at The New York Times. One gets the sense if Trump was part of a lynch mob, he’d say the media exaggerated the length of the noose.

Liberals, of course, shimmer in rage when Trumpers pretend that race has nothing to do with the worldview he inflamed in the body politic. Some of his supporters have mastered the art of bad faith argumentation, like children that stick their fingers a centimeter away from your eyeball and insist, “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”

That brand of denialism is why so many of us think ‘Make America Great Again’ is a sanitized stand in for ‘Keep America White.’

But we learned on Thursday, when the census was released, that that’s a losing battle. America will only get more diverse. The MAGA crowd ought to make amends with that inevitability. The sweep of history is outpacing their resentments.