Convicted felon, sexual predator and criminal president Donald Trump is also a unapoligetic racist, a man who ran a company with his father that was punished by the U.S. government for racist “redlining” of their housing projects long before Republicans welcomed him into their ranks.
New York Times guest columnist Thomas B. Edsall lays it out in his latest article for the paper:
President Trump’s corruption is unequaled by any previous resident of the White House. If anything, his narcissism ranks higher than his corruption. Just look at the Kennedy Center or the East Wing of the White House or Trump’s proposed triumphal arch.
Today, though, I want to look at another destructive aspect of Trump’s ascendancy: what he has done to the nation’s ability to deal with an issue that has plagued the United States since its founding and even before — race.
Trump has not only halted the agonizingly slow accommodation of conservative whites to a multiracial nation, he has also legitimated and exacerbated the most toxic attitudes toward race and immigration held by Republican voters.
In the process, he has turned the party of Abraham Lincoln — founded in 1854 to oppose the expansion of slavery westward — into the home of those high in racial resentment, xenophobia and hostility to marginalized ethnic and religious minorities.
This reactionary process did not start with Trump, but he has made it the centerpiece of both his first and second terms.
At the same time, a growing number of studies are showing that Democrats and liberals have responded to Trump’s dominant role in American politics by becoming noticeably less prejudiced and more open to diversity and growing minority populations.
In “Did Donald Trump’s Presidency Reshape Americans’ Prejudices?” Benjamin C. Ruisch and Melissa J. Ferguson, psychology professors, respectively, at the University of Kent and Yale, reported results of a survey of 1,000 American participants before Trump’s 2016 election followed by a poll of the same participants after the election:
People in Donald Trump’s political base, on average, became increasingly willing to declare their disdain toward minoritized ethnic, religious and cultural groups, both foreign groups and their fellow Americans. Following Trump’s election and during his presidency, Trump supporters on average increased in their expressed prejudice toward Muslims, immigrants and African Americans.
The opposite took place among non-Trump voters:
Progressives, and even conservatives and Republicans who did not support Trump, remained stable in — and in some cases decreased — their expressions of prejudice over this same time period. Critically, we replicated this pattern of results with over 7,700 Americans from a nationally representative sample.
The surveys did not answer the crucial question of “whether people’s authentic views had changed, or just their willingness to express those views.”
Further research, however, suggested “that these attitude shifts went beyond straightforward explicit expressions of prejudice,” revealing “an increase in ‘implicit bias’ (i.e., attitudes assessed indirectly, which are largely spontaneous and hard to control) toward Black people that corresponded precisely to Trump’s early candidacy.”
Ashley Jardina, a professor of leadership and public policy at the University of Virginia, and Trent Ollerenshaw, now a political scientist at Penn State, described a similar pattern in their 2025 paper “White Racial Polarization Before and After the Election of Donald Trump”: “Unlike his predecessors from the period of time after the modern civil rights era, Trump’s campaign rhetoric was littered with overtly xenophobic and racist statements — a strategy that politicians had long thought was likely to backfire on a national stage in an era in the era after the civil rights movement in which norms of racial equality were thought to be well established.”
We see racism in Trump’s cabinet appointments, particularly the naming of White Supremacist Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. Hegseth has fired senior Pentagon officers of color in a purge that serves White Nationalist religion he prays too while still displaying a ink-stained body of tattoos that include Nazi and racist symbols.
Writes David R. Jones of The Community Service Society:
Donald Trump no longer hides his contempt for Black and brown people. His racist attacks are no longer abstract. He openly feeds white grievance that fuels so much of our political discourse using direct and explicit white supremacist tropes and regressive policies.
Pique over Trump’s power grabs, mass deportations and fraying the social safety net consumes news coverage and public debate about his second term. And rightfully so, because the dramatic Medicaid, housing and federal job cuts have left so many poor and working-class people in a bind – and often hopeless.
The president’s nonstop outrages, however, have provided cover to cast himself as a protector of persecuted white people. The message of his strategic incitements is clear in the assault on diversity and inclusion, the desire to downplay slavery, attacks on Black leaders and majority-Black cities, support for Confederate monuments and granting migrant status to white Afrikaners from South Africa. Not coincidently, the administration’s purge of 97,000 federal workers disproportionately impacted Black women.
“The best say to describe Trump is to call him a racist pig, a bigoted bully who preys on minorities,” says one angry Republican strategist who asks not to be identified.
“He belongs in the racist robes of the Klan,” she adds.
We agree.
