Donald Trump had a long history of racist comments and behavior long before he posted a vile video on social media depicting former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as apes. From a federal lawsuit brought against Trump for alleged racial discrimination at his New York City housing developments, to the twice-impeached president buying newspaper ads calling for the execution of five black teenagers falsely accused of raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989, Trump has never hidden his racist views.
After his return to the White House in 2025, one of Trump’s first executive orders eliminated all federal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs and revoked President Johnson’s 1965 executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Over the last year, Trump has fired, without cause, dozens of the most senior black and Latino government officials at the Pentagon and other agencies; removed references to America’s history of slavery and the Jim Crow era from museums and national monuments and returned Confederate names to U.S. military bases; restored Confederate statues and purged the names of thousands of nonwhite figures in American history from federal websites. Trump’s current mass deportation policy is labeled by some as an ethnic cleansing campaign.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Amanda Hollowell, chief of campaigns with the group Color of Change. Here she assesses the Trump administration’s aggressive attack on America’s long struggle to achieve racial justice and a multi-racial democracy.
AMANDA HOLLOWELL: We label that as a neo-segregationist agenda as well. The far right legal and these policy actors are driving these assaults on anti-discrimination values with almost no consequence, trying to return us to a Jim Crow era, essentially. We’ve been organizing around these coordinated attacks on democracy and education and history since January 2025. The commentary I can make is when you see the folks that he’s aligned himself with and when we did our exposé on Project 2025 and we released a whole website—this wasn’t hidden. This was the agenda. And we knew that attack on history and the erasure of our contributions was Hit Number One. These are the same folks who control our textbooks and what we’re learning, the limited learning that we have around our history in schools.
So for us, it was more so how do we one, shape this for everyone to understand what is happening in this moment and to not name this as a one-off Trump just is a racist and these are the things that racist people do. But more so, this is an agenda of how you roll back civil rights in the country. How you erase people’s contribution in order to take us to an era of Jim Crow era where we are denying black folks economic freedom, historical freedom and the pursuit to be whole US citizens.
SCOTT HARRIS: Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, adviser Steven Miller, they all seem very focused on taking the country back 75 years, as you said, back to the Jim Crow era to try to eliminate the hard fought gains of the civil rights movement that thousands of Americans fought and died for. I know your group is certainly focused on fighting to protect those rights that were won. What’s the stage of this fight right now? Because Donald Trump, unless something unexpected happens, is going to be in office three more years and we’ve seen how destructive his administration has been to the civil rights movement’s gains just in the first 12 months.
For more information, visit Color of Change.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Amanda Hollowell (27:25) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.
