During the first six months of Donald Trump’s second term as president the nation witnessed a long list of policy decisions that reveal an explicitly white supremacist agenda. On Trump’s first day back in the White House he revoked President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin that also banned segregated work sites.
Much of Trump’s first 100 days in office has been focused on aggressively targeting undocumented immigrants of color for mass deportation without due process, while welcoming white South Africans as refugees. The administration fired large numbers of federal government workers assigned to DEI programs, as it summarily terminated — without cause — many of the highest ranking black, Latino, women and LGBTQ staff at the Pentagon and across the federal government. Trump has also methodically censored Americans of color — Black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ history and achievements documented in books in government libraries, websites, award displays, museums and federally-funded cultural institutions.
More recently, Trump has removed the names of Navy ships, named after prominent civil rights activists and a gay rights leader – and renamed Army bases honoring southern insurrectionists who sought to preserve slavery. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Kali Holloway, a columnist at The Nation magazine who has written about how Trump has provided a permission structure for Americans to publicly express their racism. Here she describes the white backlash against the Obama presidency that set the stage for Trump’s first and second election victories.
KALI HOLLOWAY: I think that there was a portion of this country that in 2008, really was astonished by Obama’s election, the election of the first black president and who never really recovered. I think that Trump’s first election was very much a reaction to that and I think that we’ve been living in the shadow of that kind of racial grievance and resentment for almost a decade now.
Concurrently, what’s happening is you see this sort of MAGA rear guard that’s doing things alongside the Trump administration. So while he’s issuing these executive orders and firing folks who happen to be people of color, but pretending that’s how that makes them unqualified for their job and essentially saying that blackness is in and of itself synonymous with ineptitude. There are the book bans that we’ve seen over the last few years. Pen America, I think their estimation is roughly 16,000 titles have been banned since 2021.
During his first term, Trump was so affronted by the 1619 project, which was this real accounting of the impact of slavery on America and its lasting kind of legacy, that he put together and paneled a committee to do The 1776 report, which by any historian who’s a serious historian, basically said, was full of falsehoods and inaccuracy. There were two House bills to ban CRT, critical race theory, which became kind of a catchall for anything that the Right didn’t like.
I think that this is an authoritarian regime. But in particular this regime is very focused on, I think, white supremacy that is the centerpiece of the Trump agenda. Trump has essentially done everything in very overt ways, I think, to signal what is important to him and the idea that they are going to recenter whiteness in this country. And I do want to emphasize that this kind of a backlash, obviously we’ve seen backlashes in the past, but the fact living in the years ahead of 2044 when America is — people I think too often, people say, “Oh, white people are going to become a minority.”
What’s really going to happen is that white people will seek to be a majority, but no group will be a majority, right? There won’t be any numerically dominant group and I think that that is, for a number of white people, the idea of demographic erasure and status loss that has inspired a kind of paranoia and hysteria. And I think Trump is a manifestation of that.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said, Kali, thank you so much. What is your assessment of how the Democratic party has responded and reacted to this overt racism and white supremacy-driven agenda that we’ve seen unfold, particularly in this second Trump administration?
KALI HOLLOWAY: We certainly understand that this is an autocratic regime and I think the Democratic party has not done enough to push back. I’m not even certain that I know exactly what that would look like, but I think strongly worded letters, for example, are not enough.
I think that when you look at what’s happening, for example, with Zorhan Mamdami in New York City. I think the reason why he succeeded so much in terms of his mayoral bid is that people are really excited to see someone who was saying very openly, “Look, we’re going to push back on Trump’s agenda. We’re going to focus on what’s important to us. We’re going to ensure that immigrants and migrants are protected. We’re going to make sure that trans people aren’t targeted. We’re going to make sure that women and people of color feel safe. And we are going to make sure that we don’t let ICE run rampant.”
I think that is something that people want to feel. They want to have candidates that speak openly to that, who acknowledge that the threat is there and who openly say full-throatedly that they are willing to push back. And I think that generally, Democrats who are in the national spotlight have not been willing to do that, and I think it’s something people are really begging for.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Kali Holloway (17:52) 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 to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
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