It is ironic that racism has long exited within the Republican party, once known as the “Party of Abraham Lincoln,” but is now dominated by White supremacists in their ranks and in those appointed by the racist convicted felon president Donald J. Trump.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, an alcoholic who had to promise to quit drinking before the Senate would confirm him, was thrown out of the National Guard because of his Nazi tattoos, which he still proudly displays whenever he wants to appear without his shirt.
Acts of outright racism appear often in Republican circles.
Writes Juan Williams in The Hill newspaper that covers Capitol HIll:
The songwriter’s question goes to Vice President JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio. One of Ramaswamy’s Republican opponents for the nomination released a video asking “Hey, Vivek, you want to play Cowboys versus Indians?” before firing a gun.
The same rival, Casey Putsch, had called Ramaswamy an “anchor baby” because he was born to immigrants from India.
Hard to believe, but Ramaswamy has played similar racial politics. He has called for the end of birthright citizenship. And he once said he doesn’t believe there are any white supremacists. “Never seen one, I’ve never met one in my life,” he said.
Excusing racism and ignoring racism is now standard for Republicans running in the Trump era.
Vance is also having past episodes of closing his eyes to racism come back to bite him. As he positions himself for a possible 2028 presidential campaign, the ugliest factions inside the MAGA movement are already signaling that his wife’s racial heritage will be a liability for him.
Nick Fuentes, one of the most influential white nationalist streamers on the right, routinely mocks both Ramaswamy and Usha Vance with racial slurs targeting brown-skinned people with South Asian heritage. He refers to them as “jeets,” a slur roughly equal in venom to the n-word for Black Americans.
This kind of outright racism is not hard to find in a Trump party that is 80 percent white.
A December 2025 Manhattan Institute poll found that among Republicans under 50, a disturbingly large 31 percent said they openly express racist views, and 25 percent that they have expressed antisemitic views.
Long gone are the days of Abraham Lincoln, Jacob Javitz and Everett Dirksen. In the old days, President George W. Bush, a Republican, reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, appointed Colin Powell as the nation’s first Black secretary of State, and elevated Condoleezza Rice, a Black woman, to serve as both national security adviser and secretary of State.
Today’s Republican Party is different. The MAGA Party has two types of members: people who are racists, and people willing to play along by pretending there is no racism.
In the American Prospect, Harold Meyerson notes:
The 1619 Project, unveiled by The New York Times some years ago, posited that America really began not in 1776, but when the first African slaves arrived at Jamestown 157 years before. A number of historians across the ideological spectrum took issue with that; most surely, every conservative did.
It’s increasingly apparent, however, that the MAGA movement—both the Trump administration and the institutional Republican Party—is embracing as its central ideology not the democratic and egalitarian credos laid out in the Declaration of Independence, but the white racism of 1619 Virginia. If they’re uncomfortable claiming that date as their defining starting point, here’s an alternative: 1877.
In that year, Reconstruction, which was the project of enabling African Americans to claim full citizenship, with all its attendant rights, was abruptly ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. White racists, calling themselves “Redeemers,” then effectively revoked those rights, often through murderous violence.
Today’s MAGA movement is nothing if not the ideological heir to those Redeemers, as determined to reverse every last vestige of the Second Reconstruction—the civil rights laws and values of the 1960s—as the Redeemers were to extirpate the First.
The Republican justices on the Supreme Court made clear their desire to redistrict Southern states in a way that would eliminate the districts, and the possibility of districts, that send, and could send, Black representatives to Congress. As my colleague David Dayen has pointed out, the more immediate impulse behind the justices’ determination to effectively revoke what remains of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is to ensure that Republicans will pick up a dozen or more House seats through the redistricting the Court will order. They clearly understand, however, that that will mean effectively disfranchising Southern Black citizens. To the extent that Chief Justice John Roberts has adduced a reason for this epochal reversal, it’s that the white racism that the Act’s supporters were combating in 1965 is now, 60 years later, a thing of the past.
But the actually existing Republican Party that the justices mean to keep in power is a veritable storehouse of white racism, reviving and initiating policies for which white racial bigotry is the only plausible explanation. The Trump administration has already made that clear by stipulating that the only foreign refugees it welcomes to our shores are a subset of South African whites, concerned that that nation’s elected leaders (predominantly Black) may use eminent domain powers to repurpose some land for public purposes. By contrast, refugees fleeing for their lives from the Taliban, the ayatollahs, or Central American gangs have had, and will have, America’s doors slammed in their face.
Yesterday, the Times reported that the Departments of State and Homeland Security had sent proposals to the White House for new refugee rules that would favor Europeans seeking to leave their homelands because they’d been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.” In other words, reducing our refugee policy exclusively to an ingathering of white Europe’s far-right and neo-fascists.
Trump’s administration and the Court’s Republicans still occasionally cling to the contention that they are simply reverting to policies of racial neutrality by striking down DEI and affirmative action policies. Trump’s actions, however, belie that argument with each passing day. He has fired, or tried to fire, Black, and female, leaders of prominent institutions—the armed services, regulatory agencies, the Federal Reserve—on either the slimmest pretexts or for no stated reason at all, while populating his administration with very disproportionately white male appointees, as if matching the demographic composition of the Eisenhower administration was his desired goal.
Go deeper down into MAGA ranks and the myth that the movement is only interested in restoring race-neutral policies crumbles at the slightest touch. Consider Charlie Kirk’s stated opposition to the Civil Rights of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in state and local government agencies and businesses serving the public. Consider his and Tucker Carlson’s commentaries questioning the competence of non-white races. Consider the hundreds of racist and sexist comments (building all the way to “I love Hitler”) that Politico discovered and reported on this week in the chats of a Young Republican group that included elected and party officials, their staffers, and campaign consultants. I see no reason to think that this group is unrepresentative of the current young Republican mainstream.
So, does today’s MAGA-fied, Trumpified GOP trace its roots to the violent white supremacists of 1877 or the first American slaveholders of 1619? Whichever, they’re certainly not the heirs of the democrats and egalitarians of 1776.
Sixty eight years ago, I covertly photographed a nighttime rally and cross burning in a field in Prince Edward County, Virginia, after the racist school board and supervisors closed the public schools to avoid a federal court order to integrate and opened a all-white private school. For years, until a Supreme Court order forced the county to integrate, children of color were denied any access to public education.
The photograph appeared in newspapers, along with an essay I had written. I decided, at age 11, to become a newspaperman and photojournalist and I spent six decades plus as a staff member on daily newspapers in Virginia and the St. Louis area and later as a contract photojournalist for other dailies and wire services.
Twenty-three of those years were spent living and working out of the National Capital Region of Washington, DC, where I found racism always present among Republicans. I verified that by working within the political system for seven of those years.
Trump is, and always has been, a racist. He and his father were fined by the federal government for keeping minorities out of housing projects they owned and operated. As a casino operator, he ordered the staff to keep minority employees out of site when he and his wife were in one of his casinos.
When he ran for president, he was endorsed by the Klan. As president, he met and dined with known White Supremacists. He openly appointed known Suprmacists like Hegseth. He supports racist candidates running for Congress and state leaderships posts.
“The Republican Party Is Racist and Soulless. Just Ask This Veteran GOP Strategist” writes David Corn in Mother Jones. “Stuart Stevens says he now realizes the hatred and bigotry of Trumpism were always at the heart of the GOP.”
Stevens, a longtime GOP political consultant, wrote a book, , It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
“The Republican Party has been a cartel,” Stevens told Corn. “And no one asks a cartel, ‘What’s your ideological purpose?’ You don’t ask OPEC, ‘What’s your ideology?’ You don’t ask a drug gang, ‘What’s your program?’ The Republicans exist for the pursuit of power for no purpose.”
“I have no one to blame but myself. So yes, blame me. Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane. Burn it to the ground and start over.”
In our conversation, Stevens exploded with loathing for the party he once faithfully (and lucratively) served. He rejected the common view that Trump had hijacked the GOP. No, he explained, the triumph of know-nothing Trumpism marked the culmination of an internal conflict that had existed for decades between the party’s “dark side” and its professed ideals. Even William F. Buckley Jr., often hailed as a grand public intellectual and the founding father of the modern conservative movement, was “a stone-cold racist” in the 1950s, Stevens pointed out. (Buckley at that time considered white people more “advanced” and more fit to govern.)
“A lot of us in the party liked to believe the dark side was a recessive gene, but it’s a dominant theme,” Stevens, a seventh-generation Mississippian who was named for Confederate Gen. Jeb Stuart, told me. “And it’s all about race. The Republican Party is a white party and there still are more white people than non-white people.” So that is whom the party aims at—even if this will eventually be a losing proposition as the nation’s demographics continue to shift. Ronald Reagan achieved a landslide victory in 1980 by bagging 56 percent of white voters; 28 years later, John McCain lost with 55 percent of white voters. Perhaps the party’s fixation on white voters can work one more time with Trump in 2020. “But we’re talking about the Confederacy—literally,” Stevens said.
And Nazi Germany. On his own, with no prompting, Stevens went straight to the Defcon-1 analogy: “I tell my GOP friends, ‘It’s crazy to say it’s 1934 in Germany…when it’s clearly 1936.’” He insisted that the 1930s are important for understanding the current moment. “When there was rising anti-Semitism, isolationism, and pro-Nazi sentiment, why did the US not become fascist?” Stevens asked. “Because of FDR. Leaders matter, and the GOP has now completely abdicated its role.” Instead, the party has yielded completely to demagoguery and race-baiting to exploit the racism and resentments of certain white voters. Throughout his decades as a Republican, Stevens considered this racist element a bug in the system. He now realizes it has been a feature.
In 2012, Romney enthusiastically sought and accepted Trump’s endorsement, though Trump had been championing the racist birther conspiracy theory. But for Stevens, the decisive moment when the party embraced its ugly heritage came in December 2015, when Trump, then the leading Republican presidential candidate, called for a ban on Muslim travelers to the United States. As Stevens now sees it, Reince Priebus, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, should have declared that the GOP did not support such bigotry and staked out a moral position. Perhaps Trump would still have marched on to victory, but such a move might have distanced the party from a racist candidate. Instead, the party kept mum and eventually folded to Trump. (Romney would go on to be the only GOP senator to vote to remove Trump from office at the end of his impeachment trial.)
Stevens now argues that Trump’s rise was not a fluke that the party can sidestep or survive. “This is the complete moral collapse of a governing party of a major superpower,” he remarked. He wonders how he could have been blind to the GOP’s racism and turpitude for so long. “It is hard to see this when you’re in the middle of it,” he said. “The only analogy I can find is the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the difference between reality and what is believed became so disjointed. I should’ve seen this. I did see this, but I wanted to believe the crazies were a minority.”
Stevens conceded that had Trump not come along, he still might not have been fully aware of the structural immorality of the GOP: The Republican Party was “a comfortable place for a lot of us. If Trump had lost, I’d probably still be working for a Republican candidate. But Trump made it impossible to deny what the party is. I just don’t get why these Republican senators don’t stand up to him. What’s the worst thing? You’ll be an ex-senator? They are the Trump Generation. It’s how they will be remembered. Like the segregationists of old.”
As a now semi-retired newspaperman and photojournalist, I have covered racism issues and protests for more than half a century and have watched, with dismay, at the loss of freedoms our nation used to consider sacred.
Trump, in my opinion, is the most dangerous domestic terrorist America has ever faced. He has brought Republican racism out of the dark recesses and uses it as a powerful tool to overturn our democratic republic. The mid-term elections in November could be a last stand for our way of life.
He continues to work and practice the sedition he used to spark the riot of his cult that trashed the Capitol in Washington, killed many, including police officers, and came too close to overturning the legal election that threw him out of the White House. But he came back, as criminals too often do. It will be up to the voters to make sure he does not destroy what is left of our democracy.
