I found myself cheating on CNN, where I’m a political commentator, with MSNBC last weekend. I just had to watch my friend, Nikole Hannah-Jones, articulate a great point that many have missed: Donald Trump is pursuing a racial agenda, not an economic one.
This isn’t historically novel. Most progress is met by this kind of backlash – from the “Red Shirts” and Klansmen who used brutal violence against Black citizens following the gains of the Reconstruction era, to the voting restrictions that followed the election of Barack Obama. But this time is different.
This time isn’t about Pete Hegseth, US secretary of defense, Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, and Trump using the recent American Airlines plane crash in Washington DC to envelop themselves in anti-DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) outrage. This isn’t about Maga devotees fighting against anti-discrimination measures, eliminating pronouns, pushing anti-vaccine pseudoscience or changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico or canceling identity-driven celebrations like the ones during Black History Month.
It’s about the fact that in spite of all this, many of us have grown numb to this brand of right-wing viciousness and cruelty. As Trump and Elon Musk try to disassemble the greatest nation on earth at its core, Washington Democrats don’t even look like they’re up to the task to stop it. Even as Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries rolls out his “resistance agenda”, questions remain. Where have Democrats been since 5 November? What is our message? What is our voice? Why aren’t we in spaces where this voice can be heard?
Meanwhile, Trump continues to use hyperbolic rhetoric invoking race and division, pushing his agenda instead of the economic populist message he ran on. His Ice raids aren’t just targeting immigrants, they’ve also ended in the detainment of American citizens, including a veteran.
Trump reversed the 60-year-old executive order that prohibited federal contractors from engaging in employment discrimination, putting countless minority small business owners on the chopping block. He stopped every single Department of Justice civil rights investigation and police reform agreement – that includes the agreements in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota that were reached following the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. These aren’t abstract political principles we’re talking about. This is about real people with real lives on the line.
Trump’s attack on civil rights and his agenda rooted in racial division don’t just affect people of color, they reach other citizens as well. Do you know what would have happened if a federal judge hadn’t paused the Trump spending freeze? It means your lead water pipes don’t get replaced. It means doctors working to cure cancer or fight Alzheimer’s have to stop their research. It means your daily commute is even more dangerous because crews stopped fixing the roads and bridges and, if you have one of the more than 330,000 clean energy jobs created by the Inflation Reduction Act, Trump tried to freeze your paycheck.
Meanwhile, the price of eggs keeps going up.
So I don’t care if Trump wants to buy Greenland or not. I care that he’s pardoning white supremacists who already organized one insurrection. I care that he fired every FBI agent and DoJ official who worked on any of the myriad investigations against him. I care that he got rid of the independent inspectors general of at least 12 major federal agencies.
What’s more, Trump and Scott Bessent, the newly confirmed treasury secretary, just gave Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (DOGE) cronies unfettered access to Americans’ sensitive information. Musk, a billionaire from South Africa who grew up filthy rich because of apartheid, is not a paid government official. He isn’t a presidential appointee. The Senate has never interviewed him, and they sure haven’t confirmed him because Trump’s Doge isn’t a real government agency.
But now they have access to your social security number, your address and your work history, and they can stop every dollar you get from the federal government, from your Medicare benefits to your tax return. Remember how mad you were the last time you heard about some huge data breach that might have exposed your personal information? Well, this is the same thing but worse and no one can investigate because Trump fired the inspector general.
I’m a Democrat from blood-red South Carolina, so I know that I’m supposed to tow the party line and lay this all at the feet of the Maga extremists. But the silence we’re getting from a lot of Americans, regardless of political party, is deafening.
Too many Republicans and Democrats are doing absolutely nothing to stop Trump, and I can only imagine how their failure to resist thrills the oligarchs in Russia and China who have been praying for this kind of good fortune for generations. It’s one thing to cheer for the madman burning down your house. It’s worse when you know how dangerous it is and have the power to stop him but you don’t. Then, the blood is on your hands, elected officials on both sides of the aisle.
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No one is coming to save us. We have to do it. That means lawsuits. That means getting injunctions against the defense department to stop them from illegally limiting media access for legitimate outlets because they don’t like the coverage and they want to make sure the only thing we know about what the government is doing is what they tell us on X, formerly Twitter.
We need lawsuits enjoining non-government entities, such as Doge, from accessing, downloading or blocking government-secured data like payroll information, social security payments or personnel records. We need expedited civil actions to protect us by keeping them from putting our secure information on private and unsecure servers, external hard drives or anything else.
Enough with the hand wringing and pearl clutching. Enough with the clever memes and the social media outrage. Enough with the symbolic gestures that don’t do anything but make you feel better.
It’s time to take action now to save our democracy because, if we don’t, we won’t have a democracy left to save.
It’s time for folks like Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, and North Carolina’s attorney general, Jeff Jackson, young progressives with the power to fight in the courts, to step up now. It’s time our civic organizations, social clubs, elected officials, all of us, to rally at DC offices. Boycott X, send back your Teslas, rally at your state capital. It has to be real action, and it has to be right now because the time is now and time is running out.
