By John Harwood
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
Donald Trump built his public career on racism. Somehow that doesn’t lessen the shock that he has placed it at the center of his second presidency.
The myriad depredations of Trump 2.0 have proven hard to track. His unilateral attacks on US trading relationships and foreign aid threaten American prosperity, diplomacy, and constitutional governance. His attempts to eviscerate the FBI and Justice Department endanger the rule of law.
Trump’s sweeping assault on the rising status of people of color, on the other hand, batters America’s social cohesion. He has brazenly stomped on the original fracture within American culture.
Over two centuries of struggle, US political leaders have taken fitful steps toward repairing that fracture. Even when progress stalls, modern society has stigmatized overt opposition to racial equality.
Without a shred of embarrassment, Trump does the opposite. He does not conceal his belief in the superiority of white men.
Ever since Trump descended that golden escalator in 2015 to denounce Mexican immigrant “rapists,” the crudeness with which he has expressed contempt for people of color fueled his takeover of the Republican Party. It has challenged the comforting assumptions of many Americans – I’m one of them – that the arc of the moral universe, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “bends toward justice.”
But the dispiriting reality is that racism fits squarely within the mainstream of American political history, from slavery through the Civil War, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, from the civil rights revolution to the reactionary MAGA movement Trump leads.
“We don’t like to talk about the fact that racism is deeply embedded in American culture and always has been,” observes Eric Foner, a leading historian of slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath. “Trump and his Cabinet are perfectly happy to appeal to these kind of racist ideas.”
Trump Mirrors US History
The debate over who can call themselves American dates back to the Revolution. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, perhaps the most infamous decision in all American jurisprudence, the Supreme Court held in 1857 that a former slave could not be a citizen. Trump launched his political career by questioning the citizenship of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president.
White dread of race-mixing girded the remorseless segregation of the Jim Crow era that followed the end of slavery. Trump warns Americans that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” (Adolf Hitler, long an object of Trump’s fascination, similarly championed racial purity.)
In 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed civil rights legislation on the grounds that it gave formerly enslaved people unfair advantages over whites. Similar claims of unfairness underly Trump’s government-wide assault on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies to expand opportunities for women and people of color.
Trump’s call for “America First” reprises the slogan of early 20th-century nativists, including the Ku Klux Klan. (In 1927, his father was reportedly arrested at a KKK gathering in New York; Donald Trump has denied the reports.)
The spokesman for the America First movement to stay out of World War II, aviator Charles Lindbergh, warned that fighting Germany could destroy “the treasures of the white race.”
The post-war civil rights movement that played out during Trump’s adolescence discredited such language. Yet the movement was hardly as unifying as the current era’s national holiday for King suggests.
“We sometimes forget how divisive the civil rights movement was,” Foner says. Less than a decade after enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Republican president’s Justice Department sued Trump’s family real estate company for discriminating against Black people in apartment rentals. The Trumps settled.
The resulting political realignment created the conditions for Trump’s political rise. While drawing Black people en masse into the Democratic Party, it packed the GOP with conservative whites who have grown increasingly aggrieved over economic, educational, and demographic changes they believe leave them behind.
White Christians, more than 80% of the population during Trump’s adolescence, now make up just over 40% of the country. Complaints of anti-white discrimination have become commonplace among Republicans. (Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk, who was born in apartheid-era South Africa, promotes the baseless conspiracy theory that white people are now persecuted in his native country.)
Resistance Required
No one doubts the existence of excesses in some DEI programs Trump seeks to eliminate. But the fact that he has set manifestly unqualified appointees such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the task shows it is not a serious effort to identify breaches of meritocracy.
Trump demonstrated this last week after an Army helicopter collided with a commercial plane in Washington, DC, killing 67 people. Without pretense of justification, he identified DEI programs blocking the “smartest people” from aviation safety jobs as a potential cause.
“I have common sense,” the president explained as if the superiority of whites were self-evident.
Some of his appointees express that conviction even more baldly. Darren Beattie, now a top Trump State Department official, wrote on social media last fall: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
For those disheartened by the lurch toward racism, Foner says, “The only true lesson of history is, this too will pass.” But that requires resistance.
“History doesn’t move in any particular direction, whatever King said,” he notes. “It has to be pushed.”
John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for the ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.
