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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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%.
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.
The deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past.
Four years ago, I published Subtle Tools, a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of “national security” in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done—through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency, and a failure to call for accountability of any sort—left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law.
And—lo and behold!—now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as—if you don’t mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours—the “perversification” of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country.
While there are already all too many examples of that very sort of perversification, let me just focus on several that could prove crucial when it comes to the future of our imperiled democracy.
Among the numerous anti-democratic trends of this century, state-sponsored racism has been a constant concern. Of the many low points in the response to 9/11, the unleashing of government policies of racial and ethnic discrimination stands out. Fearing a follow-up attack, law enforcement targeted Muslim Americans, surveilling mosques, and casting a startlingly wide net of suspicion with a sweeping disregard for civil liberties. That approach was only strengthened by the militarization of police forces nationwide in the name of targeting Arabs and Muslims. In 2002, the government even introduced the NSEERS program, a “Special Registration” requirement mandating that all males from a list of 24 Arab and Muslim countries (as well as North Korea) register and be fingerprinted. In the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, the program amounted to “a discriminatory policy that ran counter to the fundamental American values of fairness and equal protection.”
A dangerous template for discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin was thereby set in place. In his first term in office, Donald Trump promptly doubled down on that Islamophobic trend, even though his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had revoked the registration requirement. By Executive Order 13769, Trump authorized a ban on the entry into the U.S. of citizens from seven Muslim countries, an order that would be reined in somewhat by the courts and finally revoked by then-President Joe Biden.
The discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Nor, in Trump’s first term, was discrimination limited to those from Arab and Muslim countries. As the Costs of War project has pointed out, the Islamophobia of the war on terror years had set a racial-profiling precedent and example for the more broadly racist policies of the first Trump administration. “The exponential surveillance since 9/11 has also intensified the criminalization of marginalized and racialized groups… and has increasingly targeted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter.” Yes, Trump did indeed go after Black Lives Matter protesters with a vengeance during his first term, even unleashing armed federal agents without insignia to tear gas, beat, and detain such protesters in Portland, Oregon.
While Obama would end the Special Registration program and Biden would revoke the Muslim ban, no preventive measures were undertaken to guard against future racist policies and, all too unfortunately, we see the results of that today.
Trump 2.0 has already escalated discriminatory policies, focusing on protecting white males at the expense of people of color and women. In fact, his very first executive orders included several measures cracking down on asylum-seekers and closing off legal avenues to citizenship, as well as a brazen decree aimed at eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the country. Executive Order 14173 (“Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”) was issued on January 21, 2025, the very day he took office. It ordered organizations and entities—from government offices and the U.S. military to schools, businesses, and more—to end their DEI policies “within 120 days” or risk losing government funding.
Recently, making good on its threats, the Trump administration canceled $400 million of federal funding in the form of grants and contracts to Columbia University as a sign of disapproval of that university’s supposed tolerance of pro-Palestinian protests, “described,” as National Public Radio reported, “as the school’s failure to police antisemitism on campus.” Nine other universities are believed to be under similar scrutiny.
Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, Trump is planning to issue a new travel ban, including a “red list” of countries whose citizens will be prohibited from entering the United States and an “orange list” of those whose citizens would, in some fashion, be curtailed if not completely barred from entry. As yet, the specifics remain unknown.
In other words, the discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Secrecy was likewise baked into the government’s response to the war on terror, often to keep what would have been obvious abuses of the law well hidden. Whether it was the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—the phrase employed by the administration of former President George W. Bush for acts of straightforward torture—or mass surveillance, the authorization for the targeted killing of an American citizen, or the implementation of other policies that deviated from accepted law and practice, all of that and more was initially kept well hidden from the American public.
Now, many have described the brazen upheavals decreed by the Trump administration as being the very opposite of secrecy—as, in fact, “saying the quiet part out loud.” In reality, however, in these first days of his second term in office, Trump and crew have taken secrecy to a new level, replacing it with a broad policy of erasure and invisibility. In fact, despite the administration’s pledge of “radical transparency” in areas like spending, a hostile onslaught against the written record has prevailed.
This determination to bury the record was apparent during the first Trump administration. He repeatedly asserted his right, for instance, not to document his meetings with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In 2017, he reportedly confiscated notes that were taken at a meeting with Putin. In 2019, at the G-20 in Buenos Aires, he met Putin without either a translator or a note-taker present. The Washington Post reported, that “U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.” In other words, on a matter of top national security concern—U.S.-Russian relations—a “cone of seclusion” was created, effectively leaving it to the two presidents to make decisions in secret. (Meanwhile, in his first term in office, Trump allegedly flushed down the toilet certain records relevant to the classified documents case against him.)
In his onslaught against record-keeping and the public’s right to know, the National Archives has become a prime target. Trump’s battle with the archives had its origins in his legal struggle over the classified documents he was alleged to have kept in his possession in violation of the law after his first administration, even supposedly destroying security camera footage taken at Mar-a-Lago that showed boxes of those documents being moved. Now, the president has fired the U.S. archivist, replacing a professional academic with Marco Rubio, despite his duties as secretary of state.
His outright refusal to keep a record of his administration’s activities is also reflected in his insistence that the records of the Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) fall under the Presidential Records Act, which applies to the records of the president and vice president, and which comes with the guarantee that they can be withheld from the public for up to 12 years after he leaves office. The act also allows for the disposal of records, pending the approval of the national archivist.
In a further example of denying information as a form of politics, Trump’s Office of Professional Management ordered the removal of gender-related content from its websites (as well as the erasure of gender-identifying pronouns from e-mail signatures and an end to all gender-related programs and grants). This led to the removal of pages from the Census.gov website, as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and military websites, and the replacement of the acronym LGBTQ+ with LGB. Under court order, some of these webpages have been put back up, even if with this defiant note:
Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality, and therefore the administration and this department rejects it.
In other words, the Trump administration’s claims of legitimacy for its purge of information remain strong. The legacy of state-sanctioned secrecy and a parallel burying of the record, inextricably tied to the post-9/11 era, has already found a secure footing in the second Trump presidency.
Time and again in the war on terror, the Department of Justice and the courts deferred to the federal government in the name of national security. As a 2021 Brennan Center report noted, national security deference was apparent in decisions not to hear cases due to “states secret” claims, as well as in decisions that prioritized over civil-liberties guarantees and human-rights considerations what government lawyers argued were the constitutionally granted powers of the president in national security matters.
Under Trump, the second time around, it’s already clear that there’s going to be a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the legal system. Witness the administration’s attacks on judges whose decisions have gotten in the way of his agenda. When a judge ordered the restoration of public health data that had been removed from government websites, he was summarily castigated by Elon Musk as “evil” and someone who “must be fired.” Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has already moved to squelch independent decision-making by immigration court judges, threatening them with nothing short of dismissal should they rule against the president’s prerogatives.
Then there are the attacks on law firms that have opposed Trump. Recently, for instance, security clearances were removed for lawyers at the law firms of Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election, and Covington Burleigh, which represented Jack Smith, who investigated Trump in the Biden years. Lawyers from those firms were also banned from federal buildings. And don’t forget the all-out attempt to go after officials who investigated and prosecuted January 6 cases.
The idea of an independent Justice Department has been severely damaged, with the promise of so much more to come.
More often than not, the significant transformations of law and policy that grew out of the response to 9/11 were relegated to the pages of history with little or no accountability. The Senate, under Sen. Diane Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) leadership, did produce a report on the CIA’s use of torture. It detailed despicable acts of cruelty, and ultimately concluded that such techniques, decreed to be legal by the Department of Justice, were “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” And immediately upon taking office in 2009, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order officially ending the use of torture. But he was decidedly against holding any officials accountable for what had occurred, preferring, as he so memorably put it, to “look forward, not backward.” In addition, Obama refused to call torture a “crime,” labeling it a mistake instead.
Today, in more mundane matters, the distaste for accountability has been institutionalized throughout the government. In his first term in office, Donald Trump dismissed or replaced five inspectors general, officials assigned to departments throughout the executive branch of government to monitor waste, abuse, and fraud. Almost immediately upon taking office this time around, he dismissed “roughly 17” of them. For the moment, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which, from its creation, never included an inspector-general position, is now under review by the Department of Treasury’s inspector general.
Trump’s aversion to accountability clearly reflects a desire to protect his own efforts to totally control executive policy. It should, however, also serve as a striking reminder of the aversion to accountability that followed the legalization and uses of torture in the post-9/11 years, the fabricated decision to go to war in Iraq, the mass surveillance of Americans in that era, and so much more. All of this set in place a grim template for the second Trump era—the notion that no one is ultimately accountable for abusing the law when their actions have been ordered (or simply approved) by the president.
Given the magnitude of the most recent antidemocratic actions by Donald Trump and his team, blaming them on the slippery slope created during the war on terror years may seem like a distinct overreach. Yet, given the dangerous excesses we’re now witnessing, it’s worth remembering just how vulnerable the loss of certain norms of legality and accountability in those years left this country—and how sadly little we seem to have learned from that era.
Racism, a lack of deference for the courts, the failure to hold individuals and organizations accountable for informally rewriting the nation’s laws, the pervasive embrace of secrecy, and an unwillingness to erect strict guardrails to prevent the future manipulation of both laws and norms—all those realities of the war on terror years created a distinctly undemocratic template, however different in scale, for this Trumpian moment of ours. An unwillingness to be accountable or to circumvent secrecy during the war on terror led the country straight into today’s quagmire.
Today’s horrific moment should, in fact, be considered—to return to that word of mine one last time—a true perversification of past misdeeds, made all too possible by a failure in the post-9/11 years to take measures to prevent their recurrence.
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power.
It has been 160 years since the last shots were fired in the deadliest war in U.S. history, in which up to 750,000 Americans died in a rebellion by Southern states to preserve slavery. Devotees of the Confederacy have never surrendered the Lost Cause mythology, and it’s increasingly apparent Donald Trump and his administration are among them.
The Confederacy went to war to defend the antebellum economic, social, and cultural system, an autocratic fiefdom of slave states run by an oligarchal plantation class enriched by a virulent racialized foundation. “Into the hands of the slaveholders the political power of the South was concentrated by their social prestige, (and) property ownership” that created their wealth through chattel slavery and the lie of Black inferiority, wrote W.E.B. DuBois in his 1935 opus Black Reconstruction in America.
The world that marries white supremacy with authoritarian rule that inspires those who wave Confederate flags and venerate Confederate monuments is replicated in Trump’s aspirations. It filtered through Trump’s first term, most notoriously in his embrace of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose removal of a Robert E. Lee statue as “some very fine people.” But it is fully unleashed in Trump 2.0.
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power, this time under a guise to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The revisionist portrayal of the Civil War slipped out from the Pentagon under Trump loyalist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Arlington National Cemetery, the Washington Post reported, “scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website,” part of a “broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to (DEI) from its online presence.” DEI “is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military,” intoned a Pentagon spokesperson.
Biographies of prominent Black, Latino, and women service members were suddenly erased, from Sgt. William Carney, the first Black American to earn a Medal of Honor during the Civil War, to prominent heroes of later wars. Though public outrage forced restoring recognition of the service of Jackie Robinson, World War II Tuskegee Airmen, a decorated Japanese American unit while Americans of Japanese descent were interned, and the famous Navajo Code Talkers, most of the erasure remains.
Along with other purges, Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, veteran Black Army leader Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and replaced him with a less qualified white man after Brown recorded a four-minute video about conversations with his son following the police murder of George Floyd. That act exposed the fabrication of “merit” behind the anti-DEI crusade while also reimposing a portrait of white men as the presumptive standard of qualification.
“The full throttled attack on Black leadership, dismantling of civil rights protections, imposition of unjust anti-DEI regulations, and unprecedented historical erasure across the Department of Defense is a clear sign of a new Jim Crow being propagated by our Commander in Chief,” said Richard Brookshire, co-CEO of the Black Veterans Project.
The DEI crusade
Within hours of his inauguration, Trump signed executive orders and directives to eradicate “all DEI related offices and positions; equity action plans, actions, initiatives or programs; equity-related grants or contracts; and DEI performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.”
Next Trump overturned President Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors. "These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces,” noted constitutional law professor Melissa Murray, “were all part of the federal government's efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s.”
A systematic purge of employees in federal agencies led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) followed. Not coincidentally, it had a disproportionate impact on Black federal workers, as well as women and LGBTQ employees. Trump also, without evidence, blamed DEI hires for the disastrous National Airport plane crash.
Concurrently, Trump targeted legally mandated equal employment opportunity and civil rights offices that empower federal workers to file complaints and enforce antidiscrimination laws, through multiple federal agencies. Cuts also harm public health, including programs to reduce racial and gender disparities in maternal and infant health, cancer, and chronic disease.
A number of private employers have followed suit, including Amazon, Meta, Google, Walmart, Target, Goldman Sachs, Pepsi and McDonalds, ending programs intended to expand diversity within their own workforces. “Five years ago, (many) were posting about Black Lives Matter,” says Theodore Johnson, a senior adviser at the New America think tank. Now these companies are “following government cues,” getting rid of race-conscious policies as they scramble to comply with the administration’s directions.
Education has been a major assault with mandates that K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities end DEI programs, alleging they are “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies,” note professors Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith. The goal of redefining education also seeks to indoctrinate a new generation of young people in conservative ideology. Private colleges were not immune, especially as Trump slashed Biden-era initiatives and federal funds to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges, and Hispanic institutions, while forcing others, like Columbia University, to silence and criminalize dissent.
Trump has made DEI the cudgel for efforts to erase post-Civil War Reconstruction and subsequent New Deal and Civil Rights movement reforms, while seeking to reimpose Jim Crow era segregation and one-party rule. All while evading legal statues, court orders, and shaking down media and law firms deemed disloyal, punctuating the agenda of a monarchial coup in progress.
Trump’s executive order bidding to overturn the 14th Amendment right of birthright citizenship symbolizes this push. It represents a full-throated attack on what radio host Clay Cane calls “a “bedrock principle of American democracy. To dismantle it is to open the door to the erosion of all rights gained through the blood, sweat, and tears of those who came before us.”
In his seminal work The Second Founding on the Reconstruction amendments and laws, historian Eric Foner argues they “not only put abolition, equal rights, and black male suffrage into the Constitution, but in its provisions for national enforcement made the federal government for the first time what [abolitionist Sen. Charles] Sumner called ‘the custodian of freedom’.”
A key phrase of the birthright citizenship clause, Foner emphasizes, says no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws… for the first time (it) elevates equality to a constitutional right.” The Equal Protection Clause became the vehicle “for radically expanding the rights” for all “persons” not just citizens.
Aided by the 15th Amendment’s right to vote for Black men, the reforms “inspired an outburst of political organization” with “direct action to confront long standing discrimination” and created new state constitutions creating “the region’s first state-funded systems of free public education,” and other democratic reforms that produced “a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American government.”
Overall, the second founding, observes Foner, “forged a new constitutional relationship between individual Americans and the national state and were crucial in creating the world’s first biracial democracy.”
That’s what is at stake today. Public protests have forced some setbacks for the Trump coup. It will be up to all of us to escalate those efforts with the same focus of street actions, mass protests, and a united front that led to prior eras of expanded rights in order to protect a genuine democracy.