The Trump administration is waging a war on Black Americans

This is an adapted excerpt from the May 4 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Three months ago, Donald Trump posted a video online depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. He later took the video down but refused to apologize for it.

Five months ago, Trump confirmed something he had long denied. In his first term, reports emerged that during a 2018 White House meeting with senators, Trump had referred to Haiti and African nations as “s–––hole countries.” When those comments were first reported, Trump denied he ever used that language. 

But then a few months ago, he bragged, proudly, during a speech in Pennsylvania, that he had used that term — and that he still believed it. 

As is clear from the repeated daily news cycle, Trump and his administration have been bad at everything they have set their mind to. They’re terrible in the courts. They’re terrible in the court of public opinion. They’re terrible at the technocratic, practical stuff a government is supposed to do. They’re terrible at war and diplomacy. They’re bad at what they’re trying to do. Simply put, they’re not great.

But on race, on the treatment of African Americans, even being terrible at what they’re doing has still proved disastrous for the country. It’s not just posturing and messaging that validates and excites the worst bigots in the country (though it’s that too), but we’re now about 16 months into a concerted and intense targeting of Black Americans by the Trump administration. 

On his first day in office, the president proclaimed war on diversity efforts, not only in government, but in any institution in the country over which he can exert leverage, from schools to law firms to private businesses of every stripe.

He immediately started firing or trying to force out some of the highest-profile Black public officials in the government, seemingly regardless of any other criteria, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr.; the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden; Gwynne Wilcox, an attorney who served on the National Labor Relations Board; Robert Primus, a member of the Surface Transportation Board; Alvin Brown, who served on the National Transportation Safety Board; Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics; Willie Phillips, head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. 

When Trump and his top political donor, Elon Musk, then started just getting rid of huge swaths of the federal government, to disastrous effect, the biggest cuts targeted agencies that employed a disproportionate number of Black employees.

Reporter Erica Green wrote about this a few months ago for The New York Times, noting that nothing had moved backward in the federal government for Black Americans this quickly or this far in more than 100 years — since 1912, when President Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal workforce.

As Green reported of that earlier effort, “Black employees were fired or demoted to lower-level jobs, relegated to separate and inferior lunchrooms and other facilities, and accused of making white women feel unsafe.”

According to the Times, those who remained in the federal government were “humiliated.” Green cited a report that a Black worker in the Postal Service was “surrounded by screens so white workers would not have to look at him.”  

“Another employee had a cage built around him to separate him from his white counterparts,” she wrote. “A clerk in the Treasury secretary’s office was assigned to rewrite all correspondence to address Black employees by their first names.”

But in 2025 and 2026, this president and this administration are not just inheriting that history, they’re furthering it. 

Since 1965, all federal contractors have been banned, by executive order, from discriminating “on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.” Trump rescinded that 1965 rule on his first full day in office.

Less than a month later, the Trump administration announced another rule change, rescinding Clause 52.222-21 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is titled “Prohibition of Segregated Facilities” and reads: 

The Contractor agrees that it does not and will not maintain or provide for its employees any segregated facilities at any of its establishments, and that it does not and will not permit its employees to perform their services at any location under its control where segregated facilities are maintained.

That clause has been in government contracts for decades. Trump rescinded it. Which means, as bluntly reported by NPR, that “the federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains.”

Recently, fired and sidelined employees in the Department of Housing and Urban Development have sounded the alarm that the administration is no longer enforcing the law known as the Fair Housing Act, which dates back to 1968 and states that you can’t refuse to rent to someone or refuse to sell a house to someone on account of their race, color, religion, national origin or any other factor against which we’re supposed to be protected from discrimination.

In Trump’s first year back in office, Black unemployment spiked, from 6.2% up to 7.5%, the highest of all racial groups. Black unemployment had been at a record low of 4.8% under former President Joe Biden.

The Trump administration is bad at its work. It’s bad at what it sets its mind to — in all sorts of ways. But Black Americans have been targeted by this administration in a way that has nevertheless been devastating.

And that was before the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, including all of Trump’s appointees, voted to radically curtail the Voting Rights Act.

As soon as the court said it would take up that case, people started mapping out the worst-case scenario for what Trump and the Republicans could do, particularly in the South, if the Voting Rights Act — the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement — were gutted. And it looks like the snap back after the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War. 

After that ruling, the Republican governor of Louisiana suspended congressional elections already underway to rush through new maps that will presumably ensure that even though one-third of the population of the state is Black, there will be little or no Black representation in Congress from Louisiana at all.

In South Carolina, where a quarter of the population is Black, they have one majority-minority district represented by an African American, Rep. Jim Clyburn. Now, South Carolina Republicans are pushing to get rid of that district. 

In Tennessee, where 1 in 6 residents is Black, Republicans now want to make sure all nine congressional seats in the state are white.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the court’s ruling will likely cause the “largest reduction to minority representation since the end of Reconstruction.” (She probably didn’t need to use the word “likely.”)

The war on Black Americans being waged by this president and this Republican Party is one of the only things they’ve put their mind to that they’ve actually done well at: a comprehensive attack on Black public officials in the federal government and in Congress. Now, around the country, everywhere Republicans are in charge, they are scrambling to make sure that Black public officials can no longer hold office.

We’re in the middle of something really radical in this country: an effort not just to get rid of our constitutional republic, but to get rid of the multiracial democracy our Constitution is supposed to protect. The fight to save it is looking like it’s going to be the fight of our lives. 

Allison Detzel contributed.

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