The white poor have always been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across centuries attest: Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar Hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers... They are renamed often, but they do not disappear. Our very identity as a nation, no matter what we tell ourselves, is intimately tied up with the dispossessed. 
 White Trash is a commentary about class and poverty in America, specifically the poorest whites. Until very recently, they rarely had the opportunity to speak for themselves, and as a result much of the book is the history of people sneering at them or using them to promote some goal. European colonial governors, founding fathers, political leaders - all thought of them as a bad breed, lazy, the product of waste land, like a bad lot of farm animals or wilting crops. Class was often tied to race - poorer whites were often dismissed as being part of a bad breed, of being 'mongrels' or 'racial degenerates' and should have been sterilized. The uneasy history of eugenics shows how race and class are pervasive in American history and cannot really be held apart. I would have liked to see the stories of other historically poor groups, but that is a story for another book. 
 The discomforting part is the staggered attempts to help them or at least give them a foundation to move up. Only in the 20th century we see some large-scale success, but before that (and again after) are political and economic elites who rely on cheap labor. Isenberg is hardly a Marxist talking about the lumpen-proletariat, but she notes the institutional and structural reasons behind generational poverty as well as any economist. 
 Today, who speaks to the poor whites? Who appeals to them and gives them a voice? Who uses them? It would be Goldwater in 1964, or George Wallace in 1968. The two Mainstream parties today since have given them awakening or at least a place in the coalition each in their own way - Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton, GWB. The Tea Party in 2010. Now it is Trump in 2016 - surveys for his most persistent voters show a resurgence of those who lived in trailers, those who identify ethnically only as 'American', those who once held manufacturing jobs, those without even a high school education. For him, as for many of their past homes and dreams, it is a story of class conflict, of being ignored or used, and following anyone who promises a way out, wherever that is. 
 A discomforting and compelling history.