As racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ Americans made social advancements in the decades since World War II, the overt violence of Jim Crow gave way to more hidden structural violence and malign governmental neglect of marginalized communities. If private organizations or foundations wanted to advance social justice, then so be it, but conservatives in government would not help them.
However, that is no longer true with MAGA and the second Donald Trump administration. The president and his allies are using government coercion to enforce culture-war bigotry even upon private enterprises. The rhetoric coming from federal agencies and spokespeople echoes 19th-century white supremacist propaganda.
We’ve become so numb to these displays of government power in service of bigotry that they often escape our attention—especially when there is overwhelming interest in the president’s ties to a notorious child sex abuser and his outlandish accusations against Barack Obama. However, we should still reflect on the lesser but equally alarming abuse of power.
It is astonishing, for instance, that an American president is threatening to use his power to scuttle a stadium deal with a private National Football League franchise if it does not revert to a long-rejected moniker. Back in 2022, the Washington Redskins changed their name, after considerable pressure, eventually calling themselves the Washington Commanders. Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians did, similarly, renaming themselves the Cleveland Guardians. There was little objection to this at the time. The only people who would still be upset about it are those inhabiting the ugliest corners of the political spectrum. But this rump faction controls the White House’s attention, with the president of the United States claiming that there is a “big clamoring” for reverting the names when there is no such outcry. Besides, owning the libs is as much a motivation as any.
Even if there was a majoritarian desire for sports teams to restore their racially and ethnically insensitive names, it is wildly inappropriate for the government to threaten legal contracts and stadium deals, especially if the government is in the hands of a party that once championed the Tenth Amendment. If a progressive government forced an anti-racist name change, conservatives would say it was Stalinism.
On a more consequential note, advances in artificial intelligence may be our era’s most significant development for the economy, America’s position on the global stage, and the future of humanity itself. But instead of figuring out the best course to protect jobs and copyrights, prevent Chinese dominance, and responsibly advance a potential technological bonanza, the Trump administration is hobbling the tech sector with demands that AI align itself with bigoted ideological shackles. Trump’s latest Executive Order demands that AI companies working with the federal government treat obvious realities like unconscious bias as part of a “harmful ideology” that must be excised. Not only is this anti-scientific and morally wrong, but it also hampers AI development itself. As Elon Musk is learning in his attempts to manipulate his own companyxAI’s Grok, when you tell a Large Language Model (LLM) to ignore data-based realities, it begins to break down the system, and the AI itself goes haywire. Such destructive interference from a progressive government would never be tolerated.
The Trump administration’s abuse and coercion of universities and media companies has settled into an alarming pattern. MAGA ideologues have used funding threats to try to strongarm universities like Harvard and Columbia into betraying core principles of academic freedom under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The irony abounds since Trump is using the Education Department as the tip of the spear as he tries to make academia bend the knee just as he’s dismantling the 46-year-old department. It has used the threat of FCC interference with mergers and other business interests to extort major media companies into settling lawsuits they would otherwise have easily won, in what many would say effectively constitute protection racket payments to the government. Stephen Colbert will be canceled; the Paramount merger is approved with a promise from Skydance, its senior partner, that DEI will be scuttled at the new company.
Meanwhile, the Republican government’s actions and communications have been dripping with racist contempt. Beyond the horrors being perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there are other, smaller, shocking abuses. The White House just rescinded a $20 million grant to provide clean water to central California farming communities where pesticides have so contaminated the groundwater that residents cannot safely drink it. But because those residents are majority Hispanic, the Trump administration clawed back the money, labeling it a “wasteful DEI program.” On the same day, the Department of Homeland Security was approvingly sending tweets featuring 19th-century images of Manifest Destiny that have long been used in school textbooks as exemplars of white supremacist ideology.
Trump and his Republican allies are trafficking in the ugliest forms of old-school racism and modern authoritarianism and delighting in it. They are using government power not only to promote bigotry, but to intimidate private institutions into doing the same. When they lose power (as eventually they will), there must be a reckoning for this barbarism.
