Donald Trump no longer hides his contempt for Black and brown people. His racist attacks are no longer abstract. He openly feeds white grievance that fuels so much of our political discourse using direct and explicit white supremacist tropes and regressive policies.
Pique over Trump’s power grabs, mass deportations and fraying the social safety net consumes news coverage and public debate about his second term. And rightfully so, because the dramatic Medicaid, housing and federal job cuts have left so many poor and working-class people in a bind – and often hopeless.
The president’s nonstop outrages, however, have provided cover to cast himself as a protector of persecuted white people. The message of his strategic incitements is clear in the assault on diversity and inclusion, the desire to downplay slavery, attacks on Black leaders and majority-Black cities, support for Confederate monuments and granting migrant status to white Afrikaners from South Africa. Not coincidently, the administration’s purge of 97,000 federal workers disproportionately impacted Black women.
Trump now has New York City’s mayoral election in his sights, dangling ambassadorships and other federal jobs in an apparent attempt to cull the field of candidates. Does anyone believe his carpetbagging will help New Yorkers, 70 percent of whom are the very Black, Latinx, Asian and other groups the president loathes?
The mayoral candidates have an obligation – moral, personal and political – to speak out forcefully against this racist felon and grifter. They are courting the votes of Black New Yorkers to win the election. Voters deserve to know where the candidates stand on Trump. The stakes could not be higher.
Aside from running America’s largest city, the election matters because the mayor will be a major national player, willingly or not, in the runup to the 2026 midterm election. Control of the U.S. House of Representatives will ultimately determine the ongoing human cost of MAGA’s culture of cruelty and Trump’s gangster capitalism. If Republicans retain control of Congress, our democratic norms face further erosion.
For five decades, New Yorkers have observed Donald Trump, and the conclusion is undeniable: The president of the United States is not worthy of our trust nor respect. His prejudice dates to the start of his real estate career in 1973, when Human Rights Division testers found Black people who went to Trump buildings were told there were no apartments available, while white people were offered units. The Trumps settled a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit with a pledge to not discriminate.
In 1989, Trump placed notorious advertisements in the New York Times and several other prominent newspapers calling for reinstatement of the death penalty at a time when the public was consumed by the Central Park Five case. In the September 2024 presidential debate, Trump again vilified the five men, who years earlier were found to have been wrongly convicted of attacking a jogger in the park.
Few contemporary national political leaders have such a consistent pattern of deploying racist language and tropes. As president, Trump’s hostility is cut from the same cloth as Woodrow Wilson, president from 1913 to 1921, who was an arch-racist in post-Civil War race relations in the United States. Wilson presided over a period of lynching, Jim Crow segregation and the systematic reversal of racial integration in the federal work force.
Trump’s most repugnant gambit began in March, when he launched the great historical whitewashing. In vivid distillation of his views, Trump whined that the Smithsonian Institution focuses too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America. His intent is to rewrite –– if not all together erase –– the parts of American history that do not show white Europeans and their descendants in the best light.
I can assure Trump that the immense suffering of the enslaved was, in fact, quite bad, as were the evil tactics employed by white Americans in the Woodrow Wilson era, while the country rallied for national unity as World War I raged. That said, Trump’s white grievance, racially tinged insults and desire to downplay slavery is not the only concern.
The president greenlights his bigoted supporters, like Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), to say the white supremacist’s parts in public. In a speech this month at the National Conservatism Conference, Schmitt waxed nostalgically about America as a homogenous European utopia, with no mention of people of color. “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith,” Schmitt said. These were the people he described as lamenting the “memory of a country that once belonged to them.”
People of good conscience must take a stand against Trump and his minions as they try to rewrite history and return us to a time when people of color were second-class citizens.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.
