The Trump presidency marks not a rupture with America’s racist past, but its unvarnished return to
center stage. Across two terms, Donald Trump has done something no modern president dared: he has fused raw, often grotesque racial invective with a governing project that systematically
dismantles the civil-rights infrastructure painstakingly built since the 1960s. The result is a presidency in which racism is not an embarrassing byproduct, but a core operating
principle.
From Dog Whistles to Open Dehumanization
Since the civil-rights era, mainstream American politics largely relied on coded racial appeals.
Richard Nixon had “law and order.” Ronald Reagan had “welfare queens.” The point was to mobilize white grievance while preserving plausible deniability. Trump dispensed with the
euphemisms.
His political rise began with Birtherism, the racist conspiracy theory that sought to strip the first
Black president of his very Americanness. Questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship was not a factual dispute; it was an attempt to tell Black Americans, through their most visible representative,
that they would always remain conditional members of the polity.
Trump’s 2015 campaign launch extended this logic. Mexican migrants, he declared, were “rapists” and
criminals, with only a few “good people” sprinkled in. That speech did not merely insult Mexicans. It drew a racial border around the nation itself: white and “legal” on one side, brown and
criminalized on the other. The now-infamous description of African nations, Haiti and El Salvador as “shithole countries,” contrasted with his praise for immigrants from Norway, made the
hierarchy explicit. White bodies were desirable. Black and brown bodies were a threat.
By the time Trump entered the White House, these were not youthful indiscretions but a settled
worldview. As president, he called majority-Black and brown cities “infested,” told four congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from (three were born in the United States), and
spoke of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people” alongside those who protested them. Each of these moments chipped away at the post–civil rights taboo that at
least required presidents to pretend to reject racism.
The second term shows where that road leads. When a sitting president shares a video depicting Barack
and Michelle Obama as monkeys, he is not “just sharing a meme.” He is resurrecting one of the oldest and most poisonous tropes of American white supremacy: the portrayal of Black people as apes,
as less than fully human. This is not merely offensive content on a social platform. It is the symbolic apex of a decades-long project to strip Black political actors of their dignity and
legitimacy.
Policy as Racial Architecture
To treat Trump’s racism as a matter of “tone” is to miss the point. His language is not separate from
his policies; it is their blueprint. From the first days of his first term, the Trump administration set out to construct a racial state: a legal and institutional order that privileges whiteness
while waging war on the tools designed to counteract it.
The Muslim ban was the opening salvo. Framed as a national-security measure, it was born from Trump’s
campaign promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The targeted list of majority-Muslim countries and the administration’s own rhetoric made clear that
this was less about plausible threats than about sending a message: Muslims as a category were suspect. Families were separated, students stranded, grandparents barred from visiting their
grandchildren. The signal beamed across the world: religious and racial profiling was back as official doctrine.
At the southern border, the “zero tolerance” policy and systematic family separations extended this
logic. The state handcuffed and prosecuted parents—many of them asylum seekers—and tore their children away, with no serious system to reunite them. Almost all of these families were from Latin
America. There was nothing accidental about that. Less punitive alternatives were readily available and had been used by previous administrations. The cruelty was the point. A border regime that
treats Latino families as disposable is not neutral; it rests on a racial calculus about whose pain counts.
The second term does not reverse these instincts; it rationalizes them. Deportation capacity is
expanded. Local police are pressed into quasi-federal immigration roles. A vast machinery of surveillance and removal is built that falls overwhelmingly on nonwhite communities. And in a stunning
twist of racial logic, white South Africans—coded as “Afrikaners”—are identified as a priority refugee group, allegedly persecuted victims of “unjust racial discrimination.” At the very moment
the administration is curtailing remedies for systemic racism at home, it discovers racial injustice abroad only when the victims are white.
This is not incoherence. It is doctrine: racism counts only when it can be inverted, when white
populations can be recast as the true victims. Anti-racist policy for Black Americans is delegitimized as “identity politics.” Special pathways for white foreigners, by contrast, are framed as
moral redress.
Dismantling Civil Rights in the Name of “Merit”
If Trump’s immigration agenda targets who may enter and who may stay, his war on civil rights
determines who counts once they are here.
Over two terms, the administration has repeatedly sought to choke off the tools that allowed the
United States, however imperfectly, to confront its own history of racial injustice: anti-discrimination law, voting rights protections, affirmative action, and diversity, equity and inclusion
(DEI) programs.
Voting rights are an early casualty. The administration supports stricter voter-ID regimes and
documentary proof of citizenship requirements that disproportionately burden Black, Latino, Native and low-income voters. It backs legal theories and legislative pushes that gut the practical
enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, even as polling-place closures, registration purges and new barriers accumulate in precisely those communities that have long been targeted for political
exclusion.
The second term turns the screws further. Under the banner of “election integrity,” federal support is
thrown behind measures like sweeping proof-of-citizenship rules and “SAVE Act”–style proposals that would effectively lock millions of eligible voters—especially naturalized citizens and
communities of color—out of the ballot box. The pattern is not subtle: Trump lost the popular vote and depends on a coalition disproportionately white and non-urban. Racialized voter suppression
is not incidental; it is structurally advantageous.
At the same time, the administration redefines equality itself. In one flagship executive order, Trump
declares DEI efforts in federal agencies to be “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.” Programs designed to identify and remedy discrimination are recast as the real
discrimination. Affirmative action and race-conscious remedies are attacked in universities, military academies and federal contracting. Investigations into institutions like Harvard are wielded
less as neutral enforcement actions than as ideological weapons, advancing a narrative in which white applicants are the new victims of a distorted civil-rights regime.
This is what scholars have called an “inversion of racial justice.” The historical function of
civil-rights law—to protect Black Americans and other marginalized groups from entrenched discrimination—is turned on its head. White grievance becomes the organizing principle. The social
reality of racial hierarchy remains untouched; the legal architecture capable of challenging it is systematically weakened.
Purging Representation and Rewarding Racist Power
Personnel choices and symbolic acts reveal a presidency’s moral core. Here, too, Trump’s record is
telling.
His second-term Cabinet is overwhelmingly white. Black and other nonwhite officials rotate rapidly
through the administration, often leaving under a cloud of conflict, public insult or quiet marginalization. The message to aspiring Black public servants is clear: there may be room for a few,
but not for many, and certainly not for those who dissent.
Meanwhile, figures associated with some of the most egregious forms of racist law enforcement find
favor at the highest level. The pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio—convicted for defying a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos—was not an act of mercy; it was a presidential endorsement of
racist policing. It said to every sheriff and police chief in America: if you target brown bodies in the name of “law and order,” the president has your back.
Trump’s treatment of Black protest reinforces the point. When mostly Black NFL players kneel to
protest police violence, he calls them “sons of bitches” and suggests they should leave the country. Their constitutional right to dissent is framed as a betrayal of the nation. The same
president later applauds and courts the support of militias and white nationalist groups who view Black Lives Matter as a mortal enemy. In Trump’s America, Black protest is unpatriotic; white
vigilantism is not.
A Deeply American Continuity
To cast Trump as an aberration is comforting—and dangerously wrong. Much of what he has unleashed is
deeply rooted in American history.
The ape imagery deployed against the Obamas belongs to a lineage stretching from slave auctions to Jim
Crow postcards and scientific racism. The criminalization of Black protest and the deployment of “law and order” against communities of color echoes strategies honed from Reconstruction to the
war on drugs. The use of immigration law to police racial boundaries goes back to Chinese exclusion and Japanese internment. The assault on voting rights reprises the poll taxes, literacy tests
and gerrymanders that once kept Black citizens from the polls.
What Trump adds is not novelty but shamelessness. Earlier presidents learned to perform fealty to a
post–civil rights consensus. They would occasionally dog-whistle, but then solemnly declare that “this is not who we are” when the mask slipped. Trump throws away the mask. He does not merely
wink at white resentment; he names it, amplifies it and builds policy around it. The effect is corrosive: a generation grows up watching the highest office in the land treat racist speech and
action not as a scandal, but as a valid governing language.
The Uses of Racism
Why does Trump lean so heavily on racism? Because it works—for him.
First, racism is a bonding agent for an authoritarian project. By drawing a bright line between a
virtuous “we” and a threatening “they,” Trump constructs a world in which any constraint on his power can be cast as a betrayal of the “real” people in favor of undeserving outsiders. Judges are
not referees; they are agents of a cosmopolitan elite that sides with immigrants, Muslims, Black activists. Journalists are not watchdogs; they are enemies of the people aligned with “globalists”
and “illegals.” In this schema, racist tropes are not rhetorical excess—they are the glue that holds the loyal base together.
Second, racism serves as a powerful tool of material redistribution. Policies that favor the wealthy
and corporate elites—tax cuts, deregulation, union-busting, cuts to social programs—are difficult to sell to working-class voters, including white ones. But if those programs are racialized—if
welfare is portrayed as a handout to undeserving Black and brown “takers,” if student debt relief or affirmative action is cast as special treatment for minorities—then dismantling them can be
marketed as a defense of hard-working “real Americans.” Racism allows Trumpism to punch down economically while claiming to punch up culturally.
Third, racism is a weapon against the very institutions that might hold the administration
accountable. When critical scholars, journalists or activists expose systemic racism, they can be dismissed as peddlers of “anti-white” propaganda. When museums and universities teach the ugly
truths of slavery, segregation and empire, they can be accused of spreading “divisive, race-centered ideology.” The point is not just to deny racism, but to delegitimize the vocabulary needed to
name it. If you cannot say “racism,” you cannot fight it—and you certainly cannot fight those who benefit from it.
The Legacy We Refuse to Name
The Trump years—both of them—should force a reckoning. Not with the fiction that racism has suddenly
returned, but with the reality that it never left, and that a major party in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy has chosen to make it a central pillar of governance.
From the Muslim ban to family separation, from the dismantling of civil-rights protections to the
inversion of victimhood in favor of whites, from “go back” to the Obamas-as-monkeys video, the pattern is unmistakable. Trump has not merely tolerated racism. He has curated it, weaponized it and
woven it into the fabric of presidential power.
The question is no longer whether the Trump administration is racist. The question is whether American
democracy can survive a political movement that treats racism not as a shameful relic, but as a renewable resource.
Christian Lammert
JFKI FU Berlin
[email protected]
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