As his legal woes have mounted, Donald Trump has taken to casting himself on the campaign trail as a victim of discrimination at the hands of “racist” Black prosecutors engaged in “massive election interference.” Trump has called New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg “a degenerate psychopath.” And he used the word “peekaboo,” which rhymes with a racial slur, in derogatory comments about New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a $464 million judgment against Trump in a business fraud lawsuit.
Trump is playing the victim card before his devout followers by claiming he’s facing anti-white discrimination. And the courts have let Trump get away with abuses that would have landed any other defendant, Black or white, in deep trouble for contempt.
And yet, Trump and his allies keep seeking new and increasingly egregious ways to push the racist envelope.
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Last month, Rolling Stone reported that Trump has directed his advisers to look into ways his Justice Department could go after James.
Rolling Stone wrote that “one such proposal, two sources say, would involve accusing James of attempting to illegally interfere in the 2024 presidential race—an argument that would certainly be rich coming from Trump, who has been indicted at the federal and state levels over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”
And there may be something even more alarming going on regarding Trump’s plans for the Justice Department beyond seeking retribution against his political enemies.
In a new report, Axios reports that if Trump returns to the White House, his close allies “want to dramatically change the government’s interpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on “anti-white racism” rather than discrimination against people of color.”
It’s not enough that the Supreme Court has already gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act in its 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. Now the notorious former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his MAGA cohorts would like to do the same to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act by having the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division perversely focus on perceived anti-white discrimination.
According to Axios:
Trump’s Justice Department would push to eliminate or upend programs in government and corporate America that are designed to counter racism that has favored whites.
Targets would range from decades-old policies aimed at giving minorities economic opportunities, to more recent programs that began in response to the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Axios: “As President Trump has said, all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated.”
Miller is likely to play an influential policy role should Trump return to the White House. Lest we forget, he was the author of the cruel family separation policy that ripped children from the arms of their parents at the border in an effort to deter immigration. After leaving the White House, Miller founded the right-wing judicial activist group America First Legal, which he boasted was the conservatives’ “long awaited answer to the ACLU.” It’s nothing like the ACLU.
Miller has leveraged Civil Rights-era laws intended to protect minorities from discrimination to challenge “woke” corporate policies of inclusion. America First Legal has sued Nike, Disney, United Airlines, the National Football League, and CBS Entertainment — among others— for allegedly discriminating against white men. Several of the lawsuits cite the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
MSNBC opinion writer Zeeshan Aleem, commenting on the new Axios report, warned of the threat posed by a potential Trump overhaul of the Justice Department.
The prospect of Trump’s turning the Justice Department into an engine of white grievance is alarming. Not only is he likely to dismantle modest initiatives that account for historical discrimination in making hiring decisions or determining eligibility for federal funds, but he’d likely also abdicate the role of ensuring that states uphold voting rights.
Trump has long milked conservative white “racial resentment” to fuel his political cause. But an intensifying focus on “anti-white racism” allows Trump to frame white Americans as under siege from minorities and the “woke mob” — and argues that the government’s job is to step in to protect them. It’s a powerful tool for consolidating the support of a white nationalist movement and institutionalizing anew the domination of those who are already disadvantaged in our society.
Trump was already laying the groundwork to “turn back the clock on our nation’s civil and human right progress” with his conservative judicial nominees and Justice Department under Attorneys General Jeff Session and William Barr, according to The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
In September 2020, Kirsten Clarke, whom President Joe Biden subsequently appointed as assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, wrote an opinion piece for CNN in which she said what Trump “has done to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a disgrace.”
Clarke wrote:
During the Trump administration, the civil rights division has been turned upside-down, refashioned to promote a curdled vision of America, both in its refusal to enforce existing civil rights laws and, more recently, by its actively working to undermine inclusive efforts at equal justice. In short, there is no administration that has done more to obstruct and defy the mission of the division in its 63-year existence.
One example she cited was the DOJ’s decision to file an amicus brief in support of a federal lawsuit filed against Harvard by a conservative legal group that opposed race-conscious affirmative action policies. The lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina were filed on behalf of Asian and white applicants by Students for Fair Admissions, founded by Edward Blum, a former stockbroker turned conservative legal activist.
That case resulted in the June 2023, Supreme Court ruling that struck a major blow against affirmative action at colleges and universities when it ruled that race-conscious admissions programs at the two prestigious universities were unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the schools’ admissions programs “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the equal protection clause” in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
But, of course, conservative judicial activists didn’t stop there, especially when they could rely on like-minded Trump appointees on the federal bench and funding from right-wing foundations. The Balls and Strikes legal commentary website said the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling opened the door for “a host of lawsuits challenging diversity and equity initiatives in other fields.”
The American Alliance for Equal Rights, another group founded by Blum, secured a temporary injunction from a federal judge that barred the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund from awarding grants exclusively to Black women entrepreneurs.
And even an agency founded by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1969 was not immune. Last month, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas ruled that the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency must offer assistance to all individuals, regardless of race, saying preferential treatment of non-white entrepreneurs is unconstitutional. The lawsuit was filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, another conservative legal group.
Axios reports that the fear of lawsuits has had a chilling effect on support within the business community for DEI programs. Support for DEI programs was quite strong after the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, but now some businesses are rolling back these programs due to a fear of lawsuits, controversy, and attacks from conservative activists.
All of this is happening with Trump out of office. But what might happen if Trump wins the November election is frightening. The general counsel of Miller’s America First Legal is Gene Hamilton, a former Trump Justice Department official. Hamilton wrote the section on the Justice Department and federal law enforcement for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Project 2025 is the extreme right-wing agenda for a second Trump administration that “represents a threat to democracy, civil rights, the climate, and more,” according to Media Matters for America.
Hamilton is calling for “a top-to-bottom overhaul” of the DOJ, which Project 2025 claims “has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies.” What they really want is the DOJ to pursue a radical right agenda that would target Trump’s perceived enemies.