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17th-Century Planters Would Be Proud of Trump’s Embrace of Colonial Violence
President Trump talks about immigrants, Palestinians, and Black South Africans as white Europeans have talked for centuries about the peoples they sought to control.
Apr 11, 2025
In the colonial view of the world—and, in its own strange fashion, U.S. President Donald Trump’s view couldn’t be more colonial—white European colonizers were embattled beacons of civilization, rationality, and progress, confronting dangerous barbaric hordes beyond (and even, sometimes, within) their own frontiers. Colonial violence then was a necessary form of self-defense needed to tame irrational eruptions of brutality among the colonized. To make sense of the bipartisan U.S. devotion to Israel, including the glorification of Israeli violence and the demonization of Palestinians, as well as the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Black South Africa, student activists, and immigrants, it’s important to grasp that worldview.
On the Caribbean island of Barbados, Great Britain’s 1688 Act “For the Governing of Negroes” proclaimed that “Negroes… are of a barbarous, wild, and savage nature, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws, Customes, and Practices of our Nation: It is therefore becoming absolutely necessary, that such other Constitutions, Laws, and Orders, should be… framed and enacted for the good regulating or ordering of them, as may both restrain the disorders, rapines, and inhumanities to which they are naturally prone and inclined.”
The ever-present barbarian threat is now embodied by “aliens” and “radicals” who challenge Israeli colonial violence and a U.S.-dominated global order.
When I read those words recently, I heard strange echoes of how President Trump talks about immigrants, Palestinians, and Black South Africans. The text of that act exemplified what would become longstanding colonial ideologies: The colonized are unpredictably “barbarous, wild, and savage” and so must be governed by the colonizing power with a separate set of (harsh) laws; and—though not directly stated—must be assigned a legal status that sets them apart from the rights-bearing one the colonizers granted themselves. Due to their “barbarous, wild, and savage nature,” violence would inevitably be necessary to keep them under control.
Colonization meant bringing white Europeans to confront those supposedly dangerous peoples in their own often distant homelands. It also meant, as in Barbados, bringing supposedly dangerous people to new places and using violence and brutal laws to control them there. In the United States, it meant trying to displace or eliminate what the Declaration of Independence called “merciless Indian savages” and justifying white violence with slave codes based on the one the British used in Barbados in the face of the ever-present threat supposedly posed by enslaved Black people.
That grim 1688 Act also revealed how colonialism blurred the lines between Europe and its colonies. As an expansionist Europe grew ever more expansive, it brought rights-holding Europeans and those they excluded, suppressed, or dominated into the same physical spaces through colonization, enslavement, transportation, and war. Enslaved Africans were inside the territory, but outside the legal system. Expansion required violence, along with elaborate legal structures and ideologies to enforce and justify who belonged and who never would, and—yes!—ever more violence to keep the system in place.
Ideas Still With Us
The legacies of colonialism and the set of ideas behind that Act of 1688 are still with us and continue to target formerly colonized (and still colonized) peoples.
Given the increasingly unsettled nature of our world, thanks to war, politics, and the growing pressures of climate change, ever more people have tried to leave their embattled countries and emigrate to Europe and the United States. There, they find a rising tide of anti-immigrant racism that reproduces a modern version of old-fashioned colonial racism. Europe and the United States, of course, reserve the right to deny entry, or grant only partial, temporary, revocable, and limited status to many of those seeking refuge in their countries. Those different statuses mean that they are subject to different legal systems once they’re there. In Donald Trump’s America, for instance, the United States reserves the right to detain and deport even green card holders at will, merely by claiming that their presence poses a threat, as in the case of Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, arrested in New York but quickly sent into custody in Louisiana.
Colonial racism helps explain the Trump administration’s adulation of Israeli violence against Palestinians. In good colonial fashion, Israel relies on laws that grant full rights to some, while justifying the repression (not to mention genocide) of others. Israeli violence, like the Barbadian slave code, always claims to “restrain the disorders, rapines, and inhumanities to which [Palestinians] are naturally prone and inclined.”
South Africa, of course, is still struggling with its colonial and post-colonial legacy—including decades of apartheid, which created political and legal structures that massively privileged the white population there. And while apartheid is now a past legacy, ongoing attempts to undo its damage like a January 2025 land reform law have only raised President Trump’s ire in ways that echo his reaction to even the most modest attempts to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or that dreaded abbreviation of the Trump era, DEI, in American institutions ranging from the military to universities.
Israel, though, remains a paragon of virtue and glory in Trump’s eyes. Its multiple legal structures keep Palestinians legally excluded in a diaspora from which they are not allowed to return, under devastating military occupation, with the constant threat of expulsion from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and in occupied East Jerusalem, where they are Israeli residents but not full citizens and subject to multiple legal exclusions as non-Jews. (Donald Trump, of course, had a similar fantasy when he imagined rebuilding Gaza as a Middle Eastern “Riviera,” while expelling the Palestinians from the area.) Even those who are citizens of Israel are explicitly denied a national identity and subject to numerous discriminatory laws in a country that claims to represent “the national home of the Jewish people” and to which displaced Palestinians are forbidden to return, even as “Jewish settlement is a national value.”
Good Discrimination, Bad Discrimination
Lately, of course, right-wing politicians and pundits in this country have been denouncing any policies that claim special protections for, or even academic or legal acknowledgement of, long marginalized groups. They once derisively dubbed all such things “critical race theory” and now denounce DEI programs as divisive and—yes!—discriminatory, insisting that they be dismantled or abolished.
Meanwhile, there are two groups that those same right-wing actors have assiduously sought to protect: white South Africans and Jews. In his February executive order cutting aid to South Africa and offering refugee status to white Afrikaner South Africans (and only them), Trump accused that country’s government of enacting “countless… policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business.” No matter that such a view of South Africa is pure fantasy. What he meant, of course, was that they were dismantling apartheid-legacy policies that privileged whites.
Meanwhile, his administration has been dismantling actual equal opportunity policies here, calling them “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).’” The difference? President Trump is proud to kill policies that create opportunities for people of color, just as he was outraged at South Africa’s land reform law that chipped away at the historical privilege of white landowners there. His attack on DEI reflects his drive to undo the very notion of creating de facto equal access for citizens (especially people of color) who have long been denied it.
Trump and his allies are also obsessed with what his January 30 executive order called an “explosion of antisemitism.” Unlike Black, Native American, Hispanic, LGBTQIA+, or other historically marginalized groups in the United States, American Jews—like Afrikaners—are considered a group deserving of special protection.
What is the source of this supposed “explosion” of antisemitism? The answer: “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals” who, Trump claims, are carrying out “a campaign of intimidation, vandalism, and violence on the campuses and streets of America.” In other words, the ever-present barbarian threat is now embodied by “aliens” and “radicals” who challenge Israeli colonial violence and a U.S.-dominated global order.
And—this is important!—not all Jews deserve such special protection, only those who identify with and support Israel’s colonial violence. The American right’s current obsession with antisemitism has little to do with the rights of Jews generally and everything to do with its commitment to Israel.
Even the most minor deviation from full-throated support for Israeli violence earned Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) the scorn of Trump, who called him “a proud member of Hamas” and added, “He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” Apparently for Trump, the very word “Palestinian” is a slur.
Israeli Violence Is “Stunning,” While Palestinians Are “Barbaric”
The American media and officials of both parties have generally celebrated Israeli violence. In September 2024, The New York Timesreferred to Israel’s “two days of stunning attacks that detonated pagers and handheld radios across Lebanon” that killed dozens and maimed thousands. A Washington Post headline called “Israel’s pager attack an intelligence triumph.” Former President Joe Biden then lauded Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in September as “a measure of justice” and called its assassination of Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar a month later “a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world.” On Israel’s murder of the chief Hamas negotiator, Ismael Haniyeh, in the midst of U.S.-sponsored cease-fire negotiations in August, Biden could only lament that it was “not helpful.”
Compare this to the outrage professed when Columbia Middle East Studies professor Joseph Massad wrote, in an article on Arab world reactions to Hamas’s October 7 attack, that “the sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding.” For that simple reflection of those Arab reactions, Columbia’s then-President Minouche Shafik denounced him before Congress, announcing that she was “appalled” and that Massad was being investigated because his language was “unacceptable.” He never would have gotten tenure had she known of his views, she insisted. Apparently only Israeli violence can be “stunning” or a “triumph.”
In reality, however, the United States, Israel, and white South Africa exist as colonial anachronisms in what President Joe Biden, echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, described (with respect to Israel) as an “incredibly dangerous neighborhood.”
Meanwhile, at Harvard on October 9, Palestine solidarity student groups quoted Israeli officials who promised to “open the gates of hell” on Gaza. “We hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” they wrote. Despite the fact that multiple Israeli sources were saying similar things, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik posted: “It is abhorrent and heinous that Harvard students are blaming Israel for Hamas’ barbaric attacks.” Note the use of the word “barbaric” from the slave code, repeatedly invoked by journalists, intellectuals, and politicians when it came to Hamas or Palestinians, but not Israelis.
In November 2024, when the U.S. vetoed (for the fourth time) a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the world was aghast. The U.N. warned that, after a year of Israel’s intensive bombardment and 40 days of the complete blockade of humanitarian supplies, 2 million Palestinians were “facing diminishing conditions of survival.” The U.N. director of Human Rights Watch accused the U.S. of acting “to ensure impunity for Israel as its forces continue to commit crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.” The American ambassador, however, defended the veto, arguing that, although the resolution called for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, it did not provide enough “linkage.” And of course, U.S. arms, including staggeringly destructive 2,000-pound bombs, have continued to flow to Israel in striking quantities as the genocide continues.
Connecting Immigrants, Palestinians, and South Africa
Closer to home, Trump’s full-throated attack on immigrants has revived the worst of colonial language. The Marshall Project has, for instance, tracked some of his major claims and how often he’s repeated them: “Unauthorized immigrants are criminals [said 575+ times], snakes that bite [35+ times], eating pets, coming from jails and mental institutions [560+ times], causing crime in sanctuary cities [185+ times], and a group of isolated, tragic cases prove they are killing Americans en masse [235+ times].” Clearly, draconian laws are needed to control such monsters!
Trump has also promised to deport millions of immigrants and issued a series of executive orders meant to greatly expand the detention and deportation of those living in the United States without legal authorization—“undocumented people.” Another set of orders is meant to strip the status of millions of immigrants who are currently here with legal authorization, revoking Temporary Protected Status, work authorizations, student visas, and even green cards. One reason for this is to expand the number of people who can be deported since, despite all the rhetoric and the spectacle, the administration has struggled so far to achieve anything faintly like the rates it has promised.
This anti-immigrant drive harmonizes with Trump’s affection for Jewish Israel and white South Africa in obvious ways. White South Africans are being welcomed with open arms (though few are coming), while other immigrants are targeted. Noncitizen students and others have been particularly singled out for supposedly “celebrating Hamas’ mass rape, kidnapping, and murder.” The cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Rasha Alawieh, Momodou Taal, Badar Khan Suri, Yunseo Chung, and Rumeysa Ozturk (and perhaps others by the time this article is published) stand out in this regard. The Trump administration repeatedly denigrates movements for Palestinian rights and immigrants as violent threats that must be contained.
There are some deeper connections as well. Immigrants from what Trump once termed “shit-hole countries” are, in his view, not only prone to violence and criminality themselves but also inclined to anti-American and anti-Israel views, leaving this country supposedly at risk. Included in his executive order on South Africa was the accusation that its government “has taken aggressive positions toward the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel… of genocide in the International Court of Justice” and is “undermining United States foreign policy, which poses national security threats to our Nation”—almost identical wording to that used to justify the revocation of visas for Khalil and others. In other words, threats are everywhere.
Trump and his associates weaponize antisemitism to attack student protesters, progressive Jewish organizations, freedom of speech, immigrants, higher education, and other threats to his colonizer’s view of the world.
In reality, however, the United States, Israel, and white South Africa exist as colonial anachronisms in what President Joe Biden, echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, described (with respect to Israel) as an “incredibly dangerous neighborhood.” And Trump has only doubled down on that view.
Strange to imagine, but the planters of Barbados would undoubtedly be proud to see their ideological descendants continuing to impose violent control on our world, while invoking the racist ideas they proposed in the 1600s.
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Supreme Court Lets Trump Freeze Millions in Funding to Tackle Teacher Shortages
One legal expert called it "unquestionably a win for the Trump administration, but on remarkably narrow and modest terms."
Apr 04, 2025
Republican-appointed justices handed the second Trump administration its first win at the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, allowing the Department of Education to temporarily freeze millions of dollars in grants intended to help states combat K-12 teacher shortages while a legal battle over the money plays out.
The emergency order was unsigned, but the three liberals—Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—all dissented, and Chief Justice John Roberts noted that he "would deny the application" without offering further explanation. That means the decision came from the other five right-wingers, including three appointees of President Donald Trump.
The decision stems from a federal lawsuit filed in the District of Massachusetts by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general last month after the U.S. Education Department "arbitrarily terminated approximately $600 million in critical grants" for two programs: the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) and Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED).
The coalition's initial complaint explains that Congress authorized the funding "to address nationwide teacher shortages and improve teacher quality by educating, placing, and supporting new teachers in hard-to-staff schools, especially in rural and other underserved communities, and in hard-to-staff subjects, such as math and special education."
"The department's actions appear to encompass 'policy objectives' of ending disfavored but lawful efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion—objectives that Congress expressly directed grantees to carry out in creating these programs, including by identifying that these teacher preparation programs should assist 'traditionally underserved' local education agencies... and ensure 'general education teachers receive training in providing instruction to diverse populations, including children with disabilities, limited English proficient students, and children from low-income families," the document details.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun—an appointee of former President Joe Biden—found that the coalition was likely to succeed on the merits of its claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and issued the temporary restraining order sought by offiicals in California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin.
However, the country's high court granted a stay on Friday, concluding that the Trump administration "is unlikely to recover the grant funds once they are disbursed," the plaintiff states "have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running" during the legal fight, and if they "ultimately prevail, they can recover any wrongfully withheld funds through suit in an appropriate forum."
In a dissent that was under two pages, Kagan wrote that "nothing about this case demanded our immediate intervention. Rather than make new law on our emergency docket, we should have allowed the dispute to proceed in the ordinary way."
Jackson argued in her longer dissent, joined by Sotomayor, that "this court's eagerness to insert itself into this early stage of ongoing litigation over the lawfulness of the department's actions—even when doing so facilitates the infliction of significant harms on the plaintiff states, and even though the government has not bothered to press any argument that the department's harm‐causing conduct is lawful—is equal parts unprincipled and unfortunate. It is also entirely unwarranted."
In a footnote that drew attention from court watchers, Jackson accused the majority of handing the Trump administration "an early 'win'—a notch in its belt at the start of a legal battle in which the long-term prospects for its eventual success seem doubtful," and expressed concern that "permitting the emergency docket to be hijacked in this way, by parties with tangential legal questions unrelated to imminent harm, damages our institutional credibility."
I am fascinated by this fourth wall–breaking footnote from Justice Jackson criticizing the majority for handing the Trump administration "a notch in its belt at the start of a legal battle in which the long-term prospects for its eventual success seem doubtful." It's more about optics than law ...
[image or embed]
— Mark Joseph Stern ( @mjsdc.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Trump's billionaire education secretary, former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, welcomed the ruling as "an important step towards realizing the president's agenda to ensure that taxpayer funds that support education go toward meaningful learning and serving our students—not to train teachers in radical racial and gender ideologies."
Meanwhile, Steve Vladeck, CNN's Supreme Court analyst and a Georgetown University Law Center professor, said that Friday's decision "is unquestionably a win for the Trump administration, but on remarkably narrow and modest terms."
"It leaves open the possibility that the plaintiffs are going to win not just this case, but a bunch of other challenges to the government's cancellation of grants, while freezing the order in this specific case. And even that was a bridge too far for Chief Justice Roberts and the three Democratic appointees," he added. "It's a victory for the government, but a short-lived one that may soon be overtaken by far more significant losses in the other pending cases in which Trump has asked the justices to intervene."
CNN noted that the Supreme Court "has already resolved two emergency appeals from the Trump administration" and is still considering others on topics including Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship and to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for mass deportations.
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Will Black Trump Supporters Speak Out Against His Racist and Authoritarian Government?
The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era.
Mar 30, 2025
During the 2024 election campaign, candidate Donald Trump’s most controversial rally occurred at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A comedian on the program referred to the island of Puerto Rico—and by implication Puerto Ricans—as garbage. He and the Trump campaign were rightfully pilloried and called out for his disgusting bigotry.
Little notice was given, however, to another noxious racist moment at the same event. On Trump’s playlist for the rally was the Confederate and white nationalist anthem “Dixie.” Notably, that song was played as Trump loyalist and harsh defender Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was coming on stage. Donalds is African American and perhaps Trump’s most visible Black sycophant. While Black social media and journalists crucified Trump and Donalds over the incident, for Black MAGA supporters, the episode was simply put in the memory hole.
They were muted as well when Trump and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance spread racist falsehoods about Haitians supposedly eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. They seemed to be the only people in the country who didn’t hear what everyone else had heard—a fabrication of stunning proportions.
Trump and MAGA’s White Nationalist Rampage
The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era. Now that he’s president again, their voices are being quelled as his white-power, autocratic government takes shape.
The president has spent almost every day of his second term in office so far raging against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); issuing executive orders of a white nationalist flavor; attacking a federal workforce that’s disproportionately people of color; and making it clear that rolling back civil rights and Black social and education advances is one of his top priorities. Nearly every move of his has involved nods to racist themes and aims. That includes his effort to defy the Constitution and try to eliminate birthright citizenship, his mass firings and funding freezes while he vanishes DEI programs across the federal government, his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants (of color), and even his take on the wildfires in Los Angeles and the Washington area airplane-helicopter disaster.
Trump thinks of his racialized and racist perspective on such events as “common sense.” Consider that a shield for his bias against and antipathy to science and evidence, as well as his visceral inability to see Black people and other people of color in any position of authority and expertise outside of sports and entertainment.
Racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.
His vitriol against the world’s most marginalized and poor has led him to try to completely shut the door on illegal (and even legal) immigration—with a single exception. Recently, he spread his arms and opened America’s visa gates to Afrikaners, the whites whom he (along with Elon Musk) has determined are an oppressed minority in South Africa. Falsely claiming that their lands have been seized by the South African government and that they face genocide, in an executive order he called them “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” He also wrote on social media, “Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.” Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Elon Musk, Trump’s co-president, who traffics in racist themes about race and intelligence online, is South African apartheid-era born.
It must be strongly emphasized that Trump’s executive order and his multiple social posts on the subject are not only blatant lies but align with the work of South African and American white supremacists who have falsely charged that a “genocide” is indeed occurring there. And speaking of white supremacists, add to that list his decision to release the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (with, of course, Trump’s blessing and encouragement). With the stroke of a pen, he absolved violent and white nationalist criminals who had carried signs supporting the Holocaust and yelled racist epithets at Black Capitol police officers.
His war against Black agency has been happily joined by his MAGA allies in Congress. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), for example, threatened to cut off millions of dollars in aid to the District of Columbia unless Mayor Muriel Bowser removed street art that read “Black Lives Matter” and renamed the area adjacent to it (previously known as Black Lives Matter Plaza) Liberty Plaza. Clyde claimed that the art was a “divisive slogan.” It went unmentioned that, if he genuinely wanted to get rid of divisive racial symbols, he could start at home. According to the Equal Justice Institute, Clyde’s state of Georgia is host to “more than 160 monuments honoring the Confederacy.”
Silence Is Not Golden
All of this is part of Trump’s lawless and corrupt war on democracy and the strategic divisiveness that is both his brand and his currency. The convicted-felon-in-chief’s usurpation of power has been as shameless as it is brazen, as he attempts to impose a government that could be characterized as racially authoritarian. In fact, racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.
And what has been the response of Black Republican members of Congress to such behavior? Where is the pushback from his (once upon a time) only Black cabinet member, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson? Has there been any reaction from Snoop Dogg, Nelly, or other pro-Trump rappers who claim affinity with the Black grassroots? The answer, of course, is not a peep. Most have run for cover, pretending that Trump is not who he has always been: a serial racist attempting to reshape the nation into a far-right, anti-democratic, white, Christian nationalist stronghold.
Some of his prominent Black acolytes have, in fact, gone on the record opposing “equity” and DEI in general. Byron Donalds, for example, says he has issues with “equity” because it puts a person’s demographic ahead of his “actual qualifications.” It should be noted that, during the 2024 campaign, Donalds, whom Trump was then supposedly considering as a vice-presidential candidate, stated that the Jim Crow segregation era hadn’t actually been so bad because “the Black family was together” and “Black people voted conservatively.”
But qualifications or even competency are not really the issue. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, “Donald Trump does not care about merit.” It couldn’t be plainer or simpler than that. In late February, with the encouragement and full support of Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump fired Gen. CQ Brown Jr. from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is little doubt that Trump got rid of him because he was Black and had been outspoken on issues of race and inclusion. Hegseth accused him of having a “woke agenda.” Brown, a four-star general, is to be replaced by Dan Caine, who, you undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn, is white and a three-star general.
On the rare occasions when Black MAGA denizens have actually addressed the president’s pathological drive to resegregate the country, it has been to protect him and his policies from criticism. The Black Conservative Federation (BCF), for example, issued a statement, riven with White House talking points, defending Trump’s (probably illegal) federal funding freeze, even as it was being condemned broadly by so many, including some of his Republican allies. Echoing Trump, it stated without evidence that the freeze would do no harm to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicare, and Social Security while ignoring the massive negative impact it was going to have on Head Start, Medicaid, and other programs. To the BCF’s embarrassment, the president was forced to rescind the order 48 hours after it was issued.
Their one-sided loyalty to Trump knows no bounds. Last year, BCF created and presented him with the “Champion of Black America” award at their gala. And that was no joke. He gleefully accepted the award while making awkward racial remarks to the mostly white crowd. The BCF also held an inauguration event for him with tickets ranging in price from $5,000 to $100,000 dollars, which, according to the group, was soon sold out.
The BCF declared on its Facebook page that it is proud to celebrate Black History Month (BHM) and encourages everyone to “celebrate the rich tapestry of contributions made by African Americans throughout history.” Yet there was not one word addressing the cancellation of BHM events at numerous departments across the federal government following the orders of the nation’s white-supremacist-in-chief to quash DEI and any programs that seemed related to it. The Defense Department issued a memo declaring “identity months dead,” while the Transportation Department gleefully announced that it “will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances.”
Far-right political scientist and Trump booster Carol Swain, best known for the Islamophobic rant that forced her to leave her tenured position at Vanderbilt University, wrote a mumble-jumble article hailing his attack on DEI. Although like some other Black conservatives she benefited from affirmative action, she now wants to pretend that DEI is an evil distortion of civil rights. She advocates for the neutral language of “nondiscrimination,” “equal opportunity,” and “integration,” suggesting that they are acceptable conservative values unlike “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” She seems pathetically unaware that Trump has no love for civil rights, voting rights, or affirmative action.
Out of Touch with the Black Majority
It must be noted that Black MAGA is overwhelmingly out of sync with the Black community in general. In large numbers, African Americans support DEI, affirmative action, and other hard-won programs that provide opportunities historically denied thanks to racial prejudice and discrimination. Black opposition to Trump is not just due to the racist slander and bile he now aims at people of color, but also to a well-documented history of bigotry. His long record of housing discrimination and advocacy for voting suppression flies in the face of the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, signature victories for the civil rights and Black power movements that Trump and his Black supporters now disparage.
Trump garnered only single-digit support from Blacks in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Despite an effort to scam Black voters with Trump-created Black groups and false claims of surging Black support, he won only 6% of the Black vote in 2016 and 8% in 2020.
Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion.
In the 2024 election, Trump won between 13% and 16% of the Black vote. This was a rise from, but not a great leap above, that 8% (documented by the Pew Research Center) in his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden.
More recent data shows Trump rapidly losing whatever Black support he had. A YouGov and the Economist poll in February found that only 24% of Black Americans approved of Trump’s job performance so far, while about 69% disapproved. In that poll, white approval was 57% and Hispanic approval 40%.
Denied a Role in Trump’s New Administration
In the new Trump administration, Black Republicans have essentially no perch from which to speak out (even if they wanted to). Trump has one African American in his cabinet, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, as was true with Ben Carson in his first term. Both were ghettoized at HUD. And Turner has recently bent the knee and essentially surrendered HUD to Elon Musk’s rampaging “Department” of Government Efficiency. Turner, in fact, even formed a DOGE Task Force that will certainly lead to staff cuts at HUD (but no guarantee whatsoever of any savings). In the meantime, HUD canceled $4 million in DEI contracts.
Trump also nominated former football star and disastrous Senate candidate Herschel Walker to be ambassador to the Bahamas. Walker, who had to be chaperoned to interviews during his 2020 Senate campaign by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and others due to his striking inability to make it through an interview without numerous gaffes, has no qualifications whatsoever to be an ambassador.
While some of Trump’s Black supporters have grumbled privately about being ostracized and marginalized, they dare not speak out publicly or demonstrate anything less than 100% fealty. And they are hardly the only Blacks suffering job losses because of Trump.
His goal to get rid of tens of thousands of federal workers will have an immediate impact on the economic and social health of the Black community. After all, African Americans constitute a disproportionate number of federal workers, a key area of employment that helped build the Black middle class. While African Americans constitute about 12.5% of the population, they are about 19% of the federal workforce. And being central to DEI, they are essentially guaranteed to be first on the chopping black.
Yet Black MAGA gathered for a Trump-led Black History Month celebration at the White House, clearly unphased by the irony of such a grim Saturday Night Live-style moment. Like his previous BHM events, it was, of course, mostly about Trump. Some of his favorite old and new Black sycophants were there, including far-right Christian activist and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., Alveda King; golfer Tiger Woods (rumored to be dating Trump’s ex-daughter-in-law); HUD Secretary Scott Turner; Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.); and Trump youth organizer C.J. Pearson.
In an interview, Pearson stated that “President Trump’s anti-DEI policies aren’t promoting racism but what they are doing is manifesting the dream of the great Martin Luther King Jr.: a nation where one isn’t judged by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character.” Pearson was making this claim while, across the federal government, departments and agencies were canceling Black History Month celebrations and “identity” events.
As the crowd drank wine and ate snacks, neither Trump nor any of the attendees mentioned the elephant in the room: the president’s savage anti-DEI campaign.
Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion. And count on one thing, as is likely to be true of so many other aspects of Donald Trump’s policies: Their capitulation will not age well.
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