Last year, a survey of more than 1,500 people who’d voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election found a significant majority of the former president’s supporters believed that “racism against white Americans has become a bigger problem than racism against Black Americans.” The Yahoo/YouGov poll’s results are not entirely shocking: throughout his time in the public eye, Trump has unabashedly stoked a series of racist fires, and at the same time overtly rejected many of the historical truths about America’s bigoted past. It follows, then, that many of his followers would themselves have a skewed sense of American racism, how it operates, and who it affects.
Now, with the very real prospect of a second term in office on the horizon, Trump and his team of advisers have begun working on plans to federalize one vector of that inverted interpretation of discrimination. Should voters return Trump to the White House, his next Justice Department will likely “dramatically change the government’s interpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of color,” Axios reported this month, noting that many of Trump’s allies have begun “laying legal groundwork” for such an enterprise already. And within the “flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints” designed to set the stage for a subsequent civil-rights inversion, some have “been successful.”
Extremist groups are planning
At the forefront of the Trump circle’s plan to upend civil rights legislation to favor white people is Stephen Miller, the former White House adviser largely responsible for some of the administration’s most draconian anti-immigration policies. Following his time in the Trump administration, Miller, with his long and well-documented history of white nationalist leanings, founded America First Legal — a conservative nonprofit he’s described as the right wing’s “long-awaited answer to the ACLU.” The group is “primarily notable as a policy harbinger for a second Trump term,” The New York Times said last month, adding that AFL has already alleged that “‘woke corporations’ like Disney, Nike, Mattel, Hershey, United Airlines and the National Football League discriminate against white males.” After the group successfully blocked the implementation of a pandemic-era federal program designed to aid women and minority-owned businesses, Miller bragged that the victory was a “first, but crucial, step towards ending government-sponsored racial discrimination.”
Miller’s AFL is just one of the many “extremist groups planning for a second Trump presidency,” The Guardian said, noting as well the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” initiative that was coauthored in part by AFL’s general counsel and former Trump Justice Department official Gene Hamilton. America First Legal is part of a “crowded field of conservative legal advocacy organizations,” The New York Times agreed, although it separates itself from the pack somewhat by being “less interested in defending core principles and more about cherry-picking cases that feed the grievances of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero told the paper.
Perhaps most importantly, Miller’s work has a receptive audience in Trump himself, who has vowed that “all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to [President Joe] Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated,” campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung confirmed to Axios. Cheung also said that Trump is “committed to weeding out discriminatory programs and racist ideology across the federal government.”
Trump as a ‘fearless warrior for White advantage’
The notion that programs and policies designed to offset systemic racial inequality toward minorities and marginalized people are themselves “in effect, racist against White people,” is one that’s been “long embedded on the right” but has “burst into public view” in recent years, The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump said. That Trump has chosen now to frame himself as a “fearless warrior for White advantage” is in part because the “emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 drew new attention to ways in which systems of power quietly advantage White Americans — unevenly, certainly, but demonstrably.”
To some extent, Trump has increasingly begun portraying himself as being personally the victim of anti-white discrimination. He recently pushed to have Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference charges against him tossed on the grounds that Willis, who is Black, had “inappropriately injected race into the case and stoked racial animus” in her favor. Trump has also “directed his advisers to look into ways he might compel the Justice Department to investigate New York Attorney General Letitia James,” who is Black, for her investigation into deceptive business practices, Rolling Stone said, adding that Trump “regularly refers to James as ‘racist’ in his social media posts and public statements.” Just last week, conservative commentator Deroy Murdock argued in The American Spectator that Trump had grounds to sue James under the 1964 Civil Rights Act for having said she intended to fight against his administration for being “too male, too pale,” and “too stale.” He reiterated that same argument in a subsequent appearance on Fox Business, saying James’ comments constituted “sex and race discrimination.”
The Supreme Court’s ‘turn to the right’
This semi-nascent push to invert longstanding civil rights precedents comes amidst a crucial judicial context; Groups like Miller’s AFL and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 have “gained momentum with the Supreme Court’s turn to the right,” Axios said, citing in particular the court’s 2023 gutting of affirmative action. By framing racism against minorities as a “thing of the past,” the court has effectively “given white people a legal pretext to jettison any guilt they may have harbored over systemic racism” resulting in an ongoing “effort to roll back racial progress in just about every arena imaginable,” MSNBC‘s Ja’han Jones said. Miller’s work, coupled with a spate of recent federal court rulings against programs designed to counteract systemic racism, “collectively represent a broader right-wing movement against diversity,” Jones continued.
Still, America First Legal’s track record is “more heat than light,” NYU Law Professor Kenji Yoshino told The New York Times, pointing out that the group has “yet to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and more than two years have passed since it succeeded in thwarting the Biden administration’s agenda.”
With the power of the federal government behind a second Trump term, however, Trump will “turn his racist record into official government policy,” Biden’s reelection campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond told The Guardian. That late last year Axios reported Miller “could be your next attorney general” (complete with conservative media juggernaut Tucker Carlson’s “first choice” backing) is a sign of just how possible Richmond’s prediction could be.
Ultimately, there is an “irony” in “claiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past,” MSNBC’s Jones said. In their zeal to prioritize “white people’s emotional comfort over genuine equality” Trump, Miller, and their allies planning for a second term in office “have brought that racist ‘past’ into the present, demonstrating that it is “just as much a scourge as ever.”