Trump’s Appalling Racial Legacy

Donald Trump can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’s segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. While Trump has not brought us all the way back to “Whites Only” water fountains and packing Black folks in the back of buses, the ghost of Bull Connor floats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under lies that crime was out of control.

With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country.

The trifecta began with the 2023 Supreme Court ban on race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. The Court, packed into a conservative supermajority by Trump in his first term, said colleges must now be colorblind. That means willfully blind to the fact, as stated by dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the United States remains largely “an endemically segregated society.”

The effect of the ruling was immediate. A Hechinger Report analysis in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18 percent drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200. That jibes with a January study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, which found that high-achieving students from underrepresented groups of color “cascaded” downward “into less selective colleges with lower graduation rates and earnings outcomes.”

Any patronizing notions that African Americans squeezed out of elite private colleges can still get a fine education at top state schools are not borne out by data. In analyses for Brookings and the Hechinger Report, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than ten Black students after the Supreme Court decision.

To add salt to this wound, Park said many so-called “gains” of Black and Latino enrollment in public flagships were “illusory.” That is because many of the flagships claiming the most gains are the same ones that suffered massive drops in such enrollment years ago when their states banned affirmative action. Worse, Park noted that enrollment at for-profit colleges, notorious for low graduation rates and leaving students hanging high and dry in debt, were up by 15,000 Black students in 2024. That is nothing less than educational sharecropping.

Next in the trifecta is Trump’s bleaching the government of any concern about racial disparities. He has transformed divisions of government created to enforce civil rights into agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps in health care, housing discrimination, and proximity to pollution, just to name a few. A central accompaniment to the Trump administration’s termination of disparity data collection across agencies is his slew of executive orders, beginning on the first day back in office, that ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government.

He unleashed the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be on the witch hunt for companies and contractors that practice DEI and allegedly discriminate against white people. That, on top of the ban on collegiate affirmative action, triggered a national cowering on diversity that rendered to rubble any remaining reckoning about racial disparities in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

According to the global law firm A&O Shearman, the percent of the top 100 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange that used the term “diversity” in their human capital management disclosures plummeted from 96 percent in 2024 to 36 percent last year. Similarly, the percentage of companies in the S&P 500 that used the term “diversity” crashed from 93 percent to 37 percent. Institutional investing giants such as BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, State Street, Vanguard, and Morgan Stanley all removed language directing boards to consider race, ethnicity, or gender in board makeups, surrendering to Trump.

Whether by coincidence or direct effect, the disappearance of diversity is paralleled by the evaporation of jobs for Black people. Start with the federal government. It has long been an employment refuge from discrimination. In fiscal year 2021, Black women accounted for 12 percent of the federal workforce (compared to 6.6 percent of the civilian labor force). But Trump’s massive contraction of the federal government resulted in Black women accounting for 95,000—35 percent—of the 271,000 job losses, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Put another way, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimated that Black women lost more than 30 percent of their employment in the federal government last year, nearly three times more than women overall. In the overall workforce, that institute found that Black women, 14 percent of the nation’s workforce, accounted for nearly 55 percent of female job losses.

Inside and outside government, Black women suffered one of the highest shocks of unemployment in a quarter-century, with Black women with bachelor’s degrees suffering the greatest job losses. Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said in a February policy brief that the losses among educated Black women “were a direct consequence” of Trump’s federal layoffs and buyouts.

While not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment. In February of 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was 6 percent, compared to 3.8 percent for white workers. Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3 percent, while white unemployment—despite all the economic chaos induced by Trump’s wars and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7 percent.

At one point in the Biden administration, which launched efforts at DEI as well as major jobs programs, the Black and white unemployment rates were, respectively, 4.8 percent and 3.1 percent. That was the only time the Black unemployment rate was under 5 percent since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking in the last 20 years, and represented the closest parity to white workers in that time.

Under Trump 2.0, Black unemployment has rocketed back to double that of white people.

The Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais finishes the trifecta. The high court has declared that it needs proof of “intentional” racism in allowing race to be considered in maps of legislative districts. That is ridiculously cynical since everyone knows that “Republican” in most states translates to lily-white. Southern states are tripping over themselves to redraw maps with a straight face that carve up Black urban districts to add Republican congressional seats, accelerating a process that has already happened in states like Texas. On Monday, the high court issued a subsequent decision that allows Alabama to use a new congressional map that will likely eliminate a majority-Black district.

The romantic notion by many Democrats that they can easily return the favor in blue states took a hit this week when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats to Congress. Moreover, the Supreme Court has opened the door for white racial gerrymandering at all levels of local, county, and state governments, down to school boards.

The voting rights groups Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action say the Supreme Court’s decision could result in 19 more safe Republican members of Congress and 191 seats in Southern state legislatures flipping to Republicans. The Brennan Center for Justice warns that representation for communities of color at the very local level “may be at even greater risk,” as they are more likely to “escape media attention.”

This is precisely the point of the Trump presidency. It is not about the issue Trump supporters claim was their top concern. In the 2024 election, 93 percent of Trump voters told a Pew survey that the economy was their top issue. Similarly, in a YouGov poll, 91 percent and 85 percent of Trump supporters said the economy and inflation were their respective first and second concerns.

That is betrayed by all the current major polls showing Trump tanking with the general populace on the economy, keeping inflation in check, and his war on Iran, which aggravated both of the former with soaring gasoline prices and shortages of industrial and agricultural commodities.

In RealClearPolling’s May 8 averaging of the latest major surveys, Trump 2.0 was down to an approval rating of 37 percent on his handling of the economy, 39 percent for his attack on Iran, and an atrocious 29 percent on inflation. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump was down to 22 percent approval for his handling of the cost of living.

Yet Trump’s overall job approval rating among his voters and Republicans remains in the sycophant stratosphere. He still holds an 80 percent job approval rating among his voters and 94 percent who identify as Make America Great Again voters in an Economist/You Gov poll. He still has an 86 percent job approval rating from Republicans in a Morning Consult survey and an 85 percent stamp of approval in a Washington Post/ABC News poll.

One reason has to be that Trump, when it comes to race, has already gotten the job done, fulfilling the actual wishes of his voters, even with more than two and a half years to go in his term. In a May 5 Economist/YouGov poll conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, respondents were asked about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83 percent of African Americans said representation was very important or somewhat important, only 25 percent of Republicans thought the same.

Closing the case even further is the fact that the issues most boosting his high overall approval ratings are not the economy or inflation, but immigration and crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. Trump continues to get rave reviews from his base for his goon squads from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even though more than 6,200 children have been detained, according to the Marshall Project, and even though ICE bullets have killed white people (Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis).

Republicans gave Trump an 88 percent approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89 percent for his handling of the border in the Washington Post/ABC News poll. The highest Republican ratings for Trump on the issues in a Reuters/Ipsos poll were for immigration (80 percent) and crime (77 percent). Ditto for a Forbes/Harris poll (78 percent for both immigration and crime).

While only 38 percent of all Americans approved of Trump’s National Guard occupations of cities such as majority-Black Memphis and 43 percent Black Washington, D.C., 78 percent of Republicans cheered on this show of lethal force in an Ipsos/National Public Radio poll. That was despite the fact that crime was falling in most American cities, including Memphis and the nation’s capital.

Despite Trump’s economic chaos, his dismantling of public-health and environmental protections, his embrace of oligarchs and putting soldiers of all colors in harm’s way in an unprovoked war, white Republicans have made it a priority of maniacal proportions to cut off opportunity at every pass for Black and Latino people. Even though the richest universities and most powerful of corporations have capitulated to Trump on getting rid of DEI, the reverse discrimination lawsuits from conservative think tanks continue to fly and the Trump administration is still in overdrive in its witch hunt on “DEI discrimination.”

The witch hunt is so insane, the Trump administration has even canceled an effort by the Biden administration to provide septic tanks to residents in the poverty-stricken Black Belt of Alabama. The president who has used fecal references for African countries somehow finds a septic tank to be “illegal DEI,” consigning communities to literally wallow in feces.

Trump has succeeded like no other modern president in seducing his supporters to wallow in the illusion of superiority once expressed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960. The future president told aide Bill Moyers, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Republicans would rather flee down the same historical rabbit hole that led up to the Civil War and the murderous decades of enforced segregation. They willfully ignore history and the warning of Martin Luther King Jr., who said: “There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.” At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.