Photo by Brett Jordan
Donald Trump’s second presidential term is faltering. His efforts in support of Israel’s war with Iran are floundering; his immigrant-deportation plan has turned into a nightmare; his tariffs were ruled unconstitutional; and his economic agenda is failing as inflation rises. In the face of this deepening crisis, Trump is playing the race card.
In a speech welcoming the UK’s King Charles on April 29th, Trump declared, “The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.” In an accompanying photo, the White House posted a picture of Trump and King Charles with the caption, “TWO KINGS.”
The historian Heather Cox Richardson called the speech, “Trump’s blood and soil nationalism.” She is referring to a core ideological feature of fascism, an ideology that defines national identity by “blood” or heritage and “soil” or land. It prioritizes “Volk” or people, traditionally white or ethnic, having a mystical, primordial right to a territory. It excludes those who do not share this “bloodline.”
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Trump’s “blood and soil” ethos is expressed in white racism. For nearly a decade, he has railed against non-white people. In 2018, he identified El Salvador, Haiti and certain African nations as “shithole” countries, ranting, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” During his 2020 campaign, he insisted that anti-white racism now represented a greater problem than anti-Black racism. “They’re against Catholics. They’re against a lot of different people… I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.”
In a 2024 campaign speech, Trump said, “In Springfield [OH], they [Haitians] are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the peoplethat live there.” He wondered why immigrants from “nice” countries like Denmark [or] Switzerland” did not come to the U.S.
Trump has prioritized the resettlement of white South Africans (specifically Afrikaners) as refugees, citing alleged persecution. The Refugee Processing Center reports that between October 2025 and April 2026, the U.S. resettled 4,499 refugees – “all, except three from Afghanistan, were South African.” He
increased the refugee admissions ceiling by 10,000 to allow more white South Africans (“Afrikaners”) to enter the U.S.
In January 2026, referring to affirmative action in college admissions, Trump declared, “White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college.”
Most recently, the Trump administration announced plans to reduce the number of U.S. embassies and consulates in Africa that processing visa applications from 50 to 20 sites.
Trump’s comments echo a more alarming 2023 Yahoo/YouGov poll of 1,638 adults. It found that among 2020 Trump voters, 62 percent say that racism against Black Americans said was a problem while 73 percent said that racism against white Americans is a problem. Asked how much of a problem racism was only 19 percent of Trump voters said racism against Black Americans was a “big problem” while 737 percent — twice as many! — say racism against white Americans is a big problem.
Shortly after assuming the presidency in 2025, Trump declared: “We will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government.” He then initiated a campaign to terminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government. The campaign was vigorously promoted by two white conservatives close to Trump — Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the federally-funded SpaceX.
In March 2026, he issued an Executive Order declaring, “DEI activities are not only unethical and often illegal, but also cause inefficiencies, waste, and abuse within entities that engage in such practices.” Going further, it insisted: “… employees, applicants, or contracting parties are treated differently, separated, or singled out based on their race or ethnicity, rather than treated equally and objectively based on their merit and without regard to their immutable characteristics.”
Trump’s white nationalist agenda is represented by three current developments. First, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) campaign to deport “illegal” immigrants. As of April 2026, DHS reported there had been over 605,000 deportations since January 20, 2025, with total removals, including self-deportations, exceeding 2.5 million.
Second, on April 29th, the Supreme Court heard a case challenging the “temporary protective status” (TPF) for Haitians and Syrians living in the U.S. As of March 31, 2025, the U.S. provided TPS protections to about 1.3 million individuals from 17 countries. And third, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged the Times with “unlawful employment practices” against a white employee who failed to get a promotion.
Executive Orders 14151 and 14398 mandated the closure of DEI offices, removal of DEI staff and the insertion of anti-DEI clauses (FAR 52.222-90) into contracts, prioritizing a merit-based system. Musk (briefly) headed the ill-conceived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) , which claims to have cut $1 billion from federal spending. This included $495 million from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and $881 million from the Department of Education. (For a list all contract terminations, see Justin Siken’s detailed summary.)
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Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth has been a leading Trump-administration official promoting a racial – and sexist – agenda. Most recently, he blocked the promotions of nine Navy officers who, the Times reports, “had been selected by a board of senior Navy admirals.” It notes:
“Mr. Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior military officers as part of a broader campaign designed to purge the Pentagon of leaders he has disparaged as “foolish,” “reckless” and “woke.””
It added, “Nearly 60 percent of the senior officers Mr. Hegseth has fired are female or Black …”
In November 2024, before taking office and on “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast, he warned “any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI, woke s–t has got to go.” He said that on his first day in office, he would fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who he said has pushed a “woke” agenda. Going further, insisted that female soldiers should not be allowed to fight on the front lines. “I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles,” he declared. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”
Once in office, Hegseth fired Gen. Brown as well as the forced retirement of other high-ranking officers, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti (Chief of Naval Operations), and Gen. William Green (Army Chief of Chaplains). He quickly moved on to
that observations of Black History Month and Women’s History Month within the military were “dead.”
Hegseth ordered the U.S. Naval Academy to remove nearly 400 books for allegedly promoting DEI, including Janet Jacobs’s Memorializing the Holocaust; Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Anti-Racist; Jesmyn Ward; and The Fire This Time. He also removed were studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America. Yet another target was the Arlington National Cemetery website, where some 400,000 service members and their families — including presidents, generals and Medal of Honor recipients – were purged of reference to material related to Black, Hispanic and female identity for those buried there.
Trump’s racial politics were extended into law by the Supreme Court’s recent racial gerrymandering decision, Louisiana v. Callais (2026) that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As The New York Times reported, “the Supreme Court strode once again into this fraught territory with a decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, the law that allowed many Black Southerners to finally participate in American democracy after decades of systemic oppression and exclusion.”
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Trump’s racial animus long precedes his tenure as president. In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Donald and his father, Fred Trump, of Trump Management, for discriminating against Black renters. Perhaps most scandalous, in 1989 he took out a full-page in The New York Times and other local newspapers for the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers accused of rape of a white woman. The “Central Park Five” were exonerated, but Trump continues to claim they were guilty. In 2024, the renamed “Exonerated Five” sued Trump for defamation and, in 2025, a federal judge rejected his effort to dismiss the case.
The U.S. has been suffering the current round of the culture wars for a half-century and the Christian conservative forces are now winning. The wars began as battles against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade (1973) decision. Conservative religious fundamentalists long sought to reinstitute two interlocking systems of power – patriarchy and white supremacy.
In the wake of Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008, the culture wars saw increasing attacks on “critical race theory” (CRT), “cancel culture” and “wokeness.” It was also increasingly expressed in the “great replacement” conspiracy theory – i.e., that white people were being replaced.
Symbolically, the Christian right’s victory in the culture wars is represented by Trump’s 2024 re-election as president and Republicans securing control of both Houses of Congress as well as the strong influence of conservatives on the Supreme Court. Trump’s presidency has brought racism to the forefront of the culture wars.
