The Racist Roots of Trumpism

Complying with an executive order from President Trump titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the National Park Service revised a number of brochures and signs, including, bizarrely, removing the adjective “racist” from the description of Byron De La Beckwith, the Klansman who murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, in the brochures handed out at the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument: https://mississippitoday.org/2026/02/05/medgar-evers-killer-trump-says-stop-calling-him-racist/. On its face, this is a very strange edit to make – there is no actual doubt or debate about Beckwith’s racist motives, and the entire context of the National Monument is the civil rights struggle. It also seems strange that a broad executive order would be applied all the way down the chain to the level of this brochure, to make such an inexplicable change. And small as this may seem, it is not isolated. Under this administration, there has been a quiet but consistent effort to whitewash American history, including the parts of history that acknowledge racial discrimination: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/climate/national-park-service-deleting-american-history-slavery.html. It should not surprise us that an administration with no regard for the liberal democratic principles that inspired and justified the Revolution would also see no reason to remember America’s greatest hypocritical betrayal of those principles, though I would submit that it dishonors those who died in the Civil War to try to minimize the cost of that part of history. That does not, however, explain why the administration is bothering with this sort of thing.

On the surface, this could easily appear to just be a classic case of trying to advance a more positive self-depiction of America, something which many conservatives have long advocated for, often in reaction to people who go too far the other direction, and refuse to ever admit that the US did anything right, or who apply their principles selectively in their own form of particular hypocrisy, condemning the United States but turning a blind eye to worse crimes committed by “anti-imperialist” states. I am sure that some of that legacy position from an earlier GOP has gone into these revisions; it certainly smoothed the way for them. But I think this is also an example of the executive branch’s priorities, and it goes beyond defensiveness of a kind of Rockwellian Americana (Rockwell, by the way, was a supporter of civil rights – see his painting The Problem We All Live With at the top of my post, for which he was called a race traitor). Instead, it is an outworking of a very different American Rockwellian spirit: that of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.

I say this not simply because the administration does racist things (though it does), and not simply because its domestic policy priorities have come to be dominated by Stephen Miller, for whose political career racism and xenophobia are the core motivating force; I say it because it is also one of the core messages, motivations, and policy promises of Trumpism, and it has been that way since day one. That is not to say that the people who pulled the lever for the President were all motivated by racism, or that they all even believed his administration would be racist. Famously, Trump received an increased share of the nonwhite vote during the last election. But whether or not people see or acknowledge it, it has been there since day one. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and opened his campaign by slandering Mexican immigrants, many voters heard it as a message against imported criminality, a reading given a fig leaf by Trump’s “and some, I assume, are good people.” But Trump was not there to launch a measured and nuanced campaign for border security and public safety, but to kick off the next ten years of promoting discrimination, particularly against nonwhite immigrants. And of course before he came down the escalator, Trump’s personal history of racism was well-documented, stretching from when the Department of Justice sued him for racial discrimination in the 1970s all the way through his emergence on the Republican national political scene, where his brand was fueled by and synonymous with birtherism. https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-racism-history

The roots of Trump’s signature priority, and Miller’s brainchild, his harsh enforcement of immigration law – though now that he has for months disregarded numerous court orders, wrongfully imprisoned some innocent people and killed others, calling it enforcement of law is not really accurate – is itself rooted in a very ugly history of racist motivations long predating Trump. As the Times Magazine notes, Trump’s policy echoes the racial immigration quotas of 1924 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/magazine/trump-miller-immigration-ice.html.

If we look further back, it is easy to find other examples of nakedly racist immigration laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Today the law may not be so openly racist (and in fact, Trump’s GOP has not actually changed immigration law substantially – everything that is happening is being done by the executive branch on its own, theoretically operating under existing law, but simultaneously illegally spurning judicial review and legislative oversight), but the way in which it is being applied and the reasons for that remain the same kind of racist views that view some as more American than others by virtue of ethnicity.

This is the history of American nativism that Stephen Miller takes as his model, and Miller has been given wide authority by President Trump to shape American immigration enforcement. The results have been impossible to disguise as anything but deeply racist in practice. ICE (the term now colloquially applied to all of the administration’s immigration enforcement agencies) has frequently and consistently engaged in naked racial profiling in who it targets and harasses, more than suggesting a racial bias among its agents. This profiling is so important to the administration that rather than changing how ICE operates, when sued because of profiling, it instead defended the practice at the Supreme Court. Since then, ICE’s run of racial profiling has continued unabated: https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2026/01/18/allegations-of-racial-profiling-of-us-citizens-on-the-rise-as-ice-surge-expands-in-minnesota/; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lawsuit-accuses-federal-agents-racial-profiling-minneapolis-immigratio-rcna254245; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/us-citizens-racial-profiling-ice.

The signs of deep-rooted racism as a priority in this administration’s decision-making extend far beyond its approach to immigration enforcement. Even in its first month in office, the Trump administration’s targeting of DEI surged well past the pretense of pure meritocracy and into a pattern of discrimination: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-attacks-dei/681772/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCcmkEOmu9qXKYfnWJdkFISg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share. Trump was quick to cut funding that kept millions of people in poor countries in Africa alive, and to bar the door to refugees and asylum seekers from around the world – but he made sure to make an exception for white South Africans. Since then, of course, the President has continued to say and do all manner of racist and generally bigoted things, culminating in sharing the infamous video which included a depiction of the Obamas as apes: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-second-term-most-racist-moments-ranked-top-ten-list. I suppose many of these things have lost their shock value in the age of Trump, but I would remind those who minimize these things that in normal, healthier political times it took far less to create a scandal.

None of this should be surprising, given Trump’s personal history, but it also does not surprise me, because the Republican Party that Trump has remade in his own image over the past decade has now come to be staffed by people who grew up in the festering petri dish of 4chan, a website that people in my generation used to laugh about because it was the source of both ridiculous toxicity and ridiculous memes. Of course, there used to be an understanding that the people posting memes about Hitler were doing it to simply be edgy, and they still knew the difference between jokingly saying something offensive and actually meaning it; or, they grew up and grew out of it once they started to understand the humanity of others and became less immature. But over time some of these folks ceased to be able to distinguish between what they said in jest, and what they really meant; meanwhile, others simply took the joking as a permission structure which created a safe space in which to be openly bigoted. And then, as the anti-woke backlash picked up steam on the far right, and their politics focused more and more on cultural issues, and the right became increasingly synonymous among younger people with fringe online far right movements that peddled explicit nativism, racism, and misogyny, the party that now wears the skin of the GOP has come to be staffed by people who would in a past I can personally remember have been shunned in polite society. If you don’t believe me, consider the popularity of Nick Fuentes on the right, and ask yourself what kind of educated young person would be drawn to this political movement: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/nick-fuentes-tucker-carlson-randy-fine/684939/.

Or ask Rod Dreher, a very socially-conservative blogger who helped JD Vance rise to prominence and who is still close enough to right-wing politics to sit down with the Vice President when he visits Washington. This is what he had to say after a recent visit (Dreher moved to Orbanist Hungary a few years ago, preferring that kind of conservative regime as a place to live): https://roddreher.substack.com/p/what-i-saw-and-heard-in-washington.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of Republican who can run for statewide office and have establishment Republicans simply not say anything against him, even though they know better: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/bo-french-railroad-commission/. It’s not that all these old-fashioned establishment types have become Groypers, but that they no longer view bigotry as disqualifying and see no reason not to appear at events with this sort of person that they share a party ticket with.

This is who Trump appointed to help shape American messaging abroad: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/darren-beattie-state-department/681582/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCRWlNtZX21hXHSJUfbFfAaY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share. Unsurprising, then, that the entire executive branch now seems to be emitting Nazi shibboleths like weapons-grade plutonium emits radiation: https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/social-media-trump-administration-dhs/685659/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCWLG8lI1zzoB2Snp-RN8uhM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share.

And this is all downstream of the Republican Party becoming the modern home of Nazis and those happy wink at them and ignore them: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-party-nazi-problem/686055/?gift=jUioLBatr3tIwuTcBrggCa5rD7MvVqQWlVWldk-OrNc&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share.

There are so many other examples, and if you have been interacting with the younger, more online right for long, you will already know firsthand that many of these people are deeply compromised by racism. Now the party of Lincoln is compromised by them in turn, and by their elders and betters who tolerate them. But none of this is surprising, if you remember who Trump always has been, and what his political movement has always been about, from day one.