The white supremacy strategy at the core of Trump’s plans for a second term

Of all the disturbing things that could happen if Americans decide to send Donald Trump back to the White House this November, the most corrosive and far-reaching is his plan to institutionalize racism and racial bias into our federal government. An officially sanctioned scheme to deliberately elevate the interests of white Americans—which Trump and his enablers at the Heritage Foundation are planning in plain sight—would damage the nation in ways that most people may not understand.

But as the 2024 election approaches, the four out of 10 American citizens who do not identify as “White alone”‘ should try to imagine what a second Trump term would look like. People from racial backgrounds historically subjected to discrimination—including Black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—can currently take solace in knowing federal laws, however imperfectly enforced, still exist to deter open and egregious examples of racial prejudice against them. These include principles of equal protection and employment nondiscrimination that have existed to provide redress to those in the labor force for generations now.

However, the Heritage Foundation drafters of Project 2025, Trump’s blueprint for governance if he is again elected, intend to radically redefine what “racism” actually means. For them, “racism” is quite literally reimagined and reconfigured as anything that they perceive as a threat to the continued hegemony of white Americans. We are already seeing an implicit reappraisal of “racism” and civil liberties in several Republican-dominated states, as white people seek to preserve and maintain the racial dominance they have enjoyed in this country since the days of its founding.

If Trump is elected this November, these efforts will become national policy, even as laws that exist to protect against actual racism and racial bias in our society will go largely unenforced at the federal level. Instead, those same laws will be selectively applied and altered to target so-called racism against white people. This transformation is intended to encourage similar efforts in Republican-controlled states, which will then be validated by conservative judges. As explained by MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem, Project 2025 is ultimately a “path to unraveling multicultural democracy” with a goal of enshrining white dominance as the law of the land.

In recent years, the Republican Party has consciously and deliberately abandoned almost all efforts to present itself as anything but a group devoted to maintaining white power and white supremacy. The political weapon they choose to wield: blame. White Americans—particularly middle- and working-class white Americans—are routinely indoctrinated by right-wing media to believe that their inability to make economic headway in American society is due to the encroachment of other races upon their “status” as white people.

White Americans are told: 

They are not able to afford a new home, new car, or earn a substantial salary thanks to an influx of other races willing to accept lower pay.

That Black people, for example, are to blame for the high cost of health care, curtailing and diverting white people’s access to public benefits such as Medicare and Social Security, as well as their inability to accumulate more wealth. 

That racial preferences in education are to blame for holding white people back from obtaining better jobs.

That corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are skewed unfairly against them and toward undeserving racial minorities.

That white people are being “replaced” by immigrants (mostly), but more broadly by all nonwhite people. 

This is potent, inflammatory stuff, and it has formed the basis for Republican political and media strategy for decades. But it has now become open and overt propaganda, informing the Republican Party’s policy and translating into explicit strategies for governance. The fact that it’s spun from fictional, racist tropes does not matter. Described as Trump’s “war manual” for his second term, Project 2025 could take this contrived idea of white victimhood and institutionalize it at all levels of the federal government.

The Washington Spectator’s Nancy MacLean reports the Heritage Foundation has been the dominant right-wing think tank and lobbying group influencing the country’s public policies for nearly five decades. Its origins are rooted in right-wing groups that have promoted the same racist, xenophobic and intolerant rhetoric that currently informs right-wing policies at the national and state level, and Heritage itself has sought to capitalize on this country’s racial animosities since its formation in 1973. As reported by USA Today, seven of the advisory groups involved in the preparation of Project 2025 have been identified as extremist or hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

This blueprint for a second Trump administration clearly states that its philosophy is to advance the interests of white people over those “certain segments of American society” it deems undeserving of any special consideration warranted by this country’s history of racism:

Entities across the private and public sectors in the United States have been besieged in recent years by an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left. This unholy alliance speaks in platitudes about advancing the interests of certain segments of American society, but that advancement comes at the expense of other Americans and in nearly all cases violates long-standing federal law.

The entire document is riddled with attacks against government policies designed to redress discrimination against racial minorities, specifically policies that impact hiring and employment, education, and law enforcement. Instead, it sets forth a radical agenda that weaponizes federal agencies to support the interests of white people.

Project 2025’s proposed reworking of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is illustrative:

The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.

Read straightforwardly, that’s simply a restatement of what the DOJ ought to be doing in the first place. But the paragraph that directly precedes it gives away the game:

Even though numerous federal laws prohibit discrimination based on notable immutable characteristics such as race and sex, the Biden Administration—through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and other federal entities—has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of “equity.” Federal agencies and their components have established so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination, and all departments and agencies have created “equity” plans to carry out these invidious schemes.

As envisioned for a Trump-seeded Justice Department, then, “affirmative action” becomes “affirmative discrimination.” In this way, the entire mission of the Civil Rights Division is perverted to root out so-called anti-white discrimination, rather than discrimination against racial minorities. 

To appreciate the motives underlying Project 2025, it’s necessary to understand the right’s panic about the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which were triggered in part by the police killing of George Floyd. Those protests, the largest organized movement in American history, were prompted by systemic police brutality in its disparate treatment of Black citizens. American citizens’ unprecedented outpouring of support for the BLM movement resulted in many schools and workplaces adopting policies that implicitly and explicitly acknowledged the myriad forms of racial oppression and discrimination previously ignored in our society. Policies designed to raise awareness of racial bias—and reassessments of “traditional” American history (such as The New York Times’ 1619 Project)—represented an existential threat to the entire white supremacist ethic that organizations like the Heritage Foundation were founded to promote.

Project 2025 embodies the conservative backlash to such efforts. As Aleem explains, it is, at its core, a plan to reimpose white hegemony over all aspects of American life by “consolidating the support of a white nationalist movement and institutionalizing anew the domination of those who are already disadvantaged in our society.” What that means to the racial groups it targets is institutionalized and calculated indifference to employment discrimination, police brutality, and infringement on civil rights. By recasting such protections as discriminatory against white people, the intent is to reverse their adoption by broader segments of American society. 

Put bluntly, white people do not need such protections. Civil rights laws were not passed to rectify injustice against white people, because white people—particularly white men—are the nation’s most wealthy, most politically dominant, and by far the most privileged American citizens. Anti-discrimination laws will probably never change that dynamic, but they do preserve some degree of equal opportunity and protection from this country’s apparently immutable racism.

Nevertheless, emboldened by a right-wing Supreme Court demonstrably hostile to racial equity, Project 2025’s proponents see this as their moment. 

Trump adviser and infamous white supremacist Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s child kidnapping policy, has spearheaded dozens of complaints and lawsuits against private companies alleging that their inclusive hiring practices violate the civil rights of aggrieved white people. These lawsuits deliberately ignore the roots of structural racism that prompt such practices in the first place, preferring to focus on individual, inflammatory personal stories of those supposedly victimized by “reverse racism.” Unfortunately, they are likely to find a receptive audience among the conservative judiciary they often self-select to hear such cases. Miller’s group, America First Legal, is an adviser to Project 2025.

All Republican administrations from Reagan onward have sought to roll back protections against nonwhite citizens and other marginalized communities, and Trump’s initial term in office was one of the worst. But the overt, in-your-face racism Trump popularized is now routinely aped at the state level, with Republican governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis proudly implementing openly racist policies and touting public, performative gestures showing their disregard for the rights of racial minorities. Their purpose is to legitimize and normalize intolerance and discrimination, paving the way for its ultimate institutionalization.  

Project 2025 does exactly that, establishing this notion of white supremacy as national policy. For Donald Trump and the Republican Party, that’s ultimately what the 2024 election is all about.

Campaign Action