Initially published in 2013, Ian Haney-López's Dog Whistle Politics offered a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. As he showed, such appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote in favor of corporations and the rich. Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, Haney-López linked the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the decline of the middle class and the Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters.

The book proved to be remarkably prescient. Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was built almost entirely around dog whistle politics, and he won the presidency because of it. This new edition of Dog Whistle Politics updates the book by a substantial new chapter on Trump that examines his appeal and places his campaign in the historical context that the first edition of Dog Whistle Politics so perceptively uncovered.