This is what a white supremacist administration looks like
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Southern strategy
15 min read
The article directly references Lee Atwater's 1981 interview explaining how Republicans shifted from explicit to coded racial appeals. The Southern strategy is the historical political framework that contextualizes this evolution and Nixon's approach mentioned in the article.
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Willie Horton
12 min read
The article explicitly mentions the 1988 Bush campaign's use of Willie Horton as an example of implicit racial appeals in politics. Understanding this specific case provides concrete historical context for the article's argument about racial messaging.
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Civil Rights Act of 1968
15 min read
The article directly references the Fair Housing Act of 1968 when discussing JD Vance's comments about wanting to live near similar people, drawing a parallel to segregationist arguments. Understanding this landmark civil rights legislation provides essential historical context.
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By Paul Waldman
For many years, conservatives’ chief complaint about race was that liberals were constantly and unfairly accusing them of racism.
They believed only in equality and not special favors for anyone, they insisted; why, they even liked to quote that Martin Luther King line about the content of your character! So why couldn’t liberals stop shouting “Racism!” every minute, when we as a society had already solved that problem? Can’t we just stop talking about it?
As absurd as that argument always was, what’s striking about it today is not that it imagines a post-racial future we haven’t yet reached, but that it has come to describe a Republican Party of the past. The party of today, embodied as it is in Donald Trump and the administration he leads, is no longer so worried about being called racist, because it has unashamedly taken white supremacy as its cause.
In some cases, that has meant putting into action what Trump only talked about in his first term. In others, it has meant exploring entirely new frontiers of racism and xenophobia, of a kind we thought we left behind decades ago.
This appears to be an attempt to prove that the arc of history does not bend in one direction, but can double back and reverse course. Just a few years ago, conservatives struggled to navigate a world in which everyone was expected to pay fealty (whether sincerely or not) to the idea that the United States could be a multi-racial democracy in which equality was the goal toward which we all strove. But now, they’re pretending nothing of the sort.
Here are some recent developments from the president and his administration:
Using the killing of a National Guard soldier by an immigrant from Afghanistan as a pretext, Trump announced that he “will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.”
The administration has embraced the concept of “remigration,” a watchword of far-right and white supremacist groups in Europe to refer to mass deportation of non-white immigrants.
Trump has essentially shut down the refugee program, with the exception of one group: white
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