The Trump Regime's Racist Agenda

From a burgeoning police state and deportations, to rejecting DEI and denying slavery's horrors, Trump's assault on Americans and our shared history demands we speak the truth

(Photos by Tom WIlliams (left) and Bill Pugliano (right) via Getty Images)

When Donald Trump and his regime relentlessly attack Americans and all the hard-earned progress of liberal government, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by their multitude of targets. But one theme that connects many of these actions is the methodical effort to minimize or deny America’s history of slavery, reject the continuing fact of systemic racism and push strategies to prioritize the interests of white nationalist elites.

It’s not enough to just document and diagnose the problem. The only way we can confront this regime and find solutions is if we are not overwhelmed by the daily degradations; this requires recognizing the interconnections of their destructive actions.

Let’s detail some of the ways Trump and his sycophantic enablers are pursuing this agenda:

• D.E.I.: From day one, the regime has worked to end programs and initiatives seeking to address societal inequalities and turn the acronym itself into a dirty word. Even as they have succeeded in convincing businesses, government agencies, schools and the military to strip away these efforts, let’s remember that diversity is the lifeblood of American society and culture, equity is the goal of a just society, and inclusion means increasing belonging not isolating and undermining people who are different.

• Woke: The continuing attack on this word also represents the regime’s hateful opposition to empathy for vulnerable populations and commitment to racial and social justice and the pursuit of equality. “Employing ‘woke’ as a target of hate,” I noted several years ago before Trump was reelected, “is the inevitable outcome of a party and a leader convinced that cruelty, violence and white supremacy can form a winning strategy. They were and are determined to dehumanize and demonize their perceived enemies, demagogically exploiting and fueling the fear in some Americans that demographic shifts will replace the dwindling white majority and minimize their power to dominate and control.”

• Mass Deportation: We have seen how Trump’s claim that his administration would target violent criminals has quickly morphed into all-out and lawless assaults on people of color and the terrorizing of minority communities. The arrogant disregard for due process and a Republican-led Congress handing the regime $75 billion for enforcement and detention makes clear that they support a police state if it ensures control by white elites.

• Military Deployment: First the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles and now the military occupation of the District of Columbia—including military checkpoints and hovering over Union Station—make clear that the goal is not to stem violent protestors or fight crime. (Vice President JD Vance ridiculously claimed Wednesday the troops were needed at Union Station to deal with vagrancy.) Trump’s fantasy of an emergency is merely a pretext to provoke predominately Democratic and minority communities. His assertion that he’s looking to expand this military deployment in Democratic-led cities with significant Black populations—including Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland—underscores his desire to create a climate of terror and to silence dissent.

• Public Education and Federal Employment: Black Americans depend on public education and federal employment to advance economically. Federal service was among the first workforces to integrate at a time when racial segregation dominated America, which helps explain why Blacks are over-represented in the federal workforce (including about 19 percent from a population that represents about 14 percent of the nation). This, like public education, has provided critical opportunities to join the middle class. Is it any surprise that both are under attack by a regime that yearns to break minority power and produce a more ill-informed and uniform citizenry?

• Black History and Slavery: Trump’s executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” with a goal to “remove divisive or partisan narratives” is now being acted on with efforts to eradicate unwanted truths in Smithsonian museums. This week Trump complained that the Smithsonian was “out of control” and focused too much on “how bad slavery was.” This is arguably the most egregious of the regime’s racist agenda because it threatens to deny generations of Americans— and particularly the young—from knowing the truth of our history. Positive change depends on understanding what ails us.

Yes, all this can be dispiriting, but I want to share with you two sources to help remind us that what we are facing now is part of a centuries-old experience in America, in which the horrors of our history have been minimized or ignored in order to maintain white supremacy.

One is Bryan Stevenson, who is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama, where several important museums exist to document our country’s racial history. One focuses on the history of slavery (The Legacy Museum), another documents the history of lynching in America (The National Memorial for Peace and Justice).

I’d urge you to check out the website if you can’t visit in person. Listen to how Stevenson narrates the opening of a powerful video that introduces the Legacy Museum and the need to understand and confront our shared history:

We believe there’s important work that has to be done in this country to fully overcome the history and legacy of slavery. It’s important that we begin to commit to an era of truth and justice, that we tell the truth about our history, that we find the words necessary to understand all of the pain, all of the suffering that was created by 400 years of enslavement, lynching, segregation and injustice.

It begins in Africa where millions of people were kidnapped, abducted, taken from their homes, taken from their families, chained, forced onto ships where they were displaced forever. Without understanding that legacy, we don’t appreciate the harm, the damage, the tragedy that surrounded the founding of this country.

We still live in a country where there is this problem of racial inequality, racial injustice—and the narrative that created that problem of racial difference continues to haunt us today.

I asked Stevenson whether these museums have been under attack by the Trump regime since January. His response heartened me: “We made the decision many years ago not to accept state or federal funding in the creation or maintenance of our sites. So we have not been directly impacted by the current Administration or any of their efforts to limit content.”

I also reached out to my friend and former colleague Calvin Schermerhorn, a historian of slavery in the United States, who you may recall authored The Plunder of Black America, excerpted in May in these pages. I asked him to share with me brief thoughts on the long history of minimizing the horrors of slavery and prioritizing the interests of white Americans at the expense of Black Americans. Here is part of what he wrote:

Since the Civil War ended 160 years ago this spring, Americans have downplayed slavery and its horrors in the way they remembered the conflict and the history that preceded it. Ex-Confederates took the lead with a Lost Cause ideology that stressed the Civil War was about local democracy against a distant federal tyranny, which whitewashed the stated intentions of seceding states in 1860 and 1861 to preserve and perpetuate Black chattel slavery.

The victorious North joined in that historical whitewashing towards the end of the nineteenth century. Historian David Blight and others have argued that the drive to reconcile the nation included a script in which the war was a conflict of brother against brother or a national contest of manhood. The script dropped the reason for the fratricidal conflict: the arrogant Slave Power that tried to hijack representative government in the service of enslavers and their demand for slavery’s unlimited spread. In both the Lost Cause and Reconciliation script, the Civil War was about competing visions of America that left out slavery.

It’s not hard to see how Donald Trump is attempting to reject the history of slavery and racism anew, and to deny Americans today from grappling with the questions our history raises. His own public bigotry dates back at least to the early 1970s when he and his father were sued for discriminating against African Americans who sought to rent apartments in one of their buildings. A decade later Trump was calling for the execution of the Central Park Five in a full-page ad in The New York Times—that was five young Black men who were later exonerated of any crime. It’s not hard to connect the dots from that racism to his desire to resurrect fallen statues of Confederate heroes and rename military bases again with these leaders of the Lost Cause.

The effort of Trump and his enablers (particularly Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller) to dishonor the memory of accomplished Black Americans and oppose the upward mobility of non-white Americans makes clear the challenge that faces all of us who seek justice and the common good.

Hear again from Bryan Stevenson in two final questions I asked him. I suspect his responses will encourage you like they encourage me.

Beschloss: Will there be any changes to the various ways you provide knowledge and understanding about our shared history for visitors?

Stevenson: We absolutely will not curtail or restrict the presentation of information about our nation's history of slavery, racial terror lynchings, Jim Crow or racial injustice. This history has been overlooked, avoided and left out of history books for generations. The silence surrounding slavery and difficult parts of our history has to end for us to get to a place where we are less burdened and constrained by our past. It's ironic that 10 years ago, there was no African American History museum as part of the Smithsonian, and there were no Legacy Sites. We've only recently created an opportunity for learning, and now is not the time to retreat.

Beschloss: How worried or how hopeful are you that we’ll find our way through this dark period?

Stevenson: Hopefulness is a requirement. It is the garment we must wear. Living in Montgomery, Alabama, walking in the footprints of the people who came before me who did so much more with so much less, I have to be hopeful that we will absolutely overcome the ignorance and misguided notion that we can hide from history, suppress the truth or avoid the lessons of our past.

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Trump’s ability to trigger the racist impulses of millions of Republicans and rally white nationalists to his cause is no sign of special political skill. Rather, it’s a reminder of how deep these impulses go in the national psyche and how easily a racist demagogue can incite them.

As historian Schermerhorn reminded me, “Until the Civil Rights era, histories and textbooks written for popular and school audiences tended to downplay, excuse or even celebrate slavery and enslavers. To many, it was a closed chapter; the sin of slavery was expunged by the blood of Union soldiers,” he said. And even today, “Gen X schoolchildren grew up on stories of Confederate heroism and slavery as a sideline or footnote to American history rather than as prologue to nearly a century of Jim Crow and enduring racial discrimination.”

Yes, we have a job to do. Trump and his regime are trying their damnedest to reject the past, glorify the enemies of democracy and basic human decency, and shove their white supremacist agenda down our throats. They may slow down the march of progress, but we must continue to speak out with the knowledge that one day the truth can free us all from our troubled history.

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