Any Way the Wind Blows

The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms.
Peter Beinart "Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt"

The idea that Mr. Beinart bases this column around, that Trump voters are convinced that he's their man because he stands up for traditional notions of the privileged place of Whites in the United States, may be correct. But the idea that the reaction to the alleged murder of Mollie Tibbets by illegal immigrant Cristhian Rivera strikes me as over-argued at best, and a straw man at worst.

Mainly because Mr. Rivera would have been a convenient villain no matter whom he was alleged had killed. Had the victim been another person in the country illegally, there would have been an easy argument for how violent and depraved migrants are; after all, they even prey on their own. Had the victim been a legal immigrant to the United States, it's easy to imagine a story proclaiming that lax immigration laws put the hardworking people who follow the rules at risk from immoral people who don't. And had the victim been born to American citizenship, the story would be much the same. Criminal aliens coming into the country to prey on hardworking Americans. And it's hard to understand how the ethnicity or gender of the victim would have changed this. Sure, there is a strain of White supremacy that views the virtue of White women as something in desperate need of protection, but given that many Trump voters find the entire idea of illegal migration to be an existential threat, it seems unlikely there's anyone whose death spares Mr. Rivera from slings and arrows.

One can even imagine the a non-White victim for Mr. Rivera would only have served to increase his usefulness as a foil (and representative of all that's wrong in the world) for supporters of President Trump. If Ms. Tibbetts had been Black, one can see a case being made that Mr. Rivera's presence in the country is proof that the Democratic Party, in it's  zeal to pack it's voter rolls with illegal migrants, is more than willing to abandon Black voters. And while this argument is unlikely to win any converts, negative statements almost never are. Instead, the hope is that it sows enough fear, uncertainty and doubt that some number of Black voters stay home in November, and in so doing, take the energy out of a possible Blue Wave.

It's worth pointing out that this isn't to put words in anyone's mouth. I am not attempting to predict what a Fox News article would have said, had Mr. Rivera killed someone other than Mollie Tibbets. It is useful, I think, to understand what such an article could have said, and still served the same purpose. It's a common enough trope that supporters of President Trump are unreconstructed White Supremacists, would-be Nazis and Confederate apologists that no expression of White nationalist identity is beyond them. But they don't need to be. Their simple nationalism, regardless of color, would be enough to make Mr. Rivera a Public Enemy, regardless of which member of the public he'd targeted.