White Supremacy in Donald Trump’s White House
One year on, the Trump administration’s descent deeper into the gutter of racism no longer comes as a surprise. Trump’s second presidency has been devoted to demolishing anti-discrimination policies based on the absurd claim that they are unfair to white people, especially white men, who are now the real victims of racism. This is a departure for Republicans. Not that many years ago, most of them would try to co-opt the civil rights narrative as their own by claiming the U.S. had achieved the “colorblind” society that was supposedly Martin Luther King Jr.’s end goal. Thus, civil rights–era reforms were no longer necessary because the movement had succeeded.
Today, Trump and JD Vance have dropped the hollow tributes to King and replaced them with disgusting racist memes that blatantly appeal to white men to see themselves as victims of anti-discrimination policies. The point of this isn’t just to undermine the historic accomplishments of the civil rights movement. It is also to create a scapegoat for the poor and working-class whites who make up a growing section of the MAGA base to blame for declining living standards. Dismantling what remains of civil rights–era laws and policies is necessary to bury the radical legacy of the civil rights movement, which, at its core, was about more than representation in politics and business or even formal political and legal equality. It was about materially improving the lives of all Black people and ultimately of all the have-nots.
Trump’s second presidency began in January 2025 with a frenzy of executive orders, including ones attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Within months, this had led to purges of lawyers and federal employees charged with protecting civil rights. By December, Vance was bragging to a nearly all-white audience at a Turning Point USA conference, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” His statement was so uncontroversial for the Trump administration that it barely received news coverage. In an X (formerly Twitter) post shortly before that speech, Andrea Lucas, Trump’s chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asked, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” Trump himself weighed in during a January New York Times interview, in which he declared that “white people were very badly treated” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly causes whites who “deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job” to lose out. Trump’s white supremacy got cruder still at the start of Black History Month, when he posted a video on Truth Social in which Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces were pasted on the bodies of apes.
If the aim of this undisguised racism is to distract white working-class MAGA supporters from Trump’s abject failure to usher in a new golden age of prosperity for them, it is becoming less and less effective. In November 2024, Trump won half of all voters making $50,000 or less, according to exit polls; his approval rating among this group is now at 38 percent and dropping. Still, the relentless campaign to portray whites as the victims of Black people who got a leg up thanks to government bureaucrats and the Democratic Party has had an effect. An Associated Press–NORC poll in July 2025 found that nearly 40 percent of white adults believe diversity and equity initiatives increase discrimination against white people. A previous poll in 2022 showed that 30 percent of white Americans believe discrimination against them had increased “a lot more” in the past five years.
Many of the beliefs expressed in these polls are detached from reality. By almost any measure, working-class Black Americans continue to lag far behind their white peers. At $55,157, median Black household income in 2024 was over $30,000 less than white household income. The numbers are so skewed because Black workers earn less than white workers in nearly every major industry. Black unemployment is nearly double the rate of white unemployment. Only one in three Black families has a retirement account, compared with more than 60 percent of white families. And the value of those accounts for Blacks is lower because of racism in hiring and differences in wages and salaries over a working lifetime.
As for the favorite boogeyman of the White House, the actual record of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, even in their heyday following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, has never been as robust and impactful as either their boosters or detractors have claimed. Indeed, before the right began its crusade against DEI, many of the biggest critics of these initiatives were people on the left who pointed out that they produced more pledges to make companies diverse than actual jobs for Blacks.
Far from replacing qualified white workers with unqualified Black ones, as Vance and Trump insist is happening, DEI initiatives typically set aspirational goals that mean little beyond a vague commitment to do better. Consider the words of billionaire Larry Fink, CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, in an open letter issued a week into the 2020 protests: “As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organizations and not tolerate our shortcomings. We can only heal these wounds — building a more diverse and inclusive firm and contributing to a more just society — if we talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships.” BlackRock increased its fraction of Black employees from 5 percent in 2020 to 8 percent by 2025, a relatively minor change and hardly evidence of Black workers replacing white ones. The company has since dismantled its DEI initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders and legal threats against corporations that maintained such programs.
The surge of corporate initiatives spurred by the 2020 protests did cause a brief boom in the hiring of diversity specialists. Companies in the S&P 500 hired new heads of diversity at a rate of about 12 per month following George Floyd’s death — almost three times the rate of the previous 16 months. But within three years of the Floyd protests — even before the return of Trump — there was a sharp turn away from these types of hires. According to the employment website ZipRecuiter, job posts related to corporate diversity positions fell by 63 percent in 2023. Besides adding those specialists, diversity initiatives have had almost no impact on who sits in corporate boardrooms. One 2021 report found that only three Fortune 500 companies were led by a Black CEO, down from seven less than a decade previously; there have only ever been two Black women CEOs. As the report noted, “There are more CEOs named ‘John’ than female CEOs.”
Outside of employment, the record of corporate initiatives to address racism is no better. According to the McKinsey consulting firm, between May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, and October 2022, nearly 1,400 American corporations pledged $340 billion to address racism in America. Only a fraction of the money went to addressing the overpolicing of Black people that led to Floyd’s brutal death; just eight companies made donations to Black Lives Matter organizations. Instead, most of the pledges were for investment in housing and other ventures intended to stimulate greater participation from Black consumers. For example, JPMorgan Chase’s racial equity commitment included $8 billion for 40,000 new mortgages and $4 billion to cover 20,000 refinancing agreements over five years. This and similar initiatives were basically profit-making schemes, promoted as aid and assistance. Above all, they were merely promises made by private organizations with no public mechanism for determining if the promises were kept.
In the summer of 2020 and after, it was easier to emphasize antiracism and diversity with bromides about solidarity with Black Lives Matter than to deal with the implications of the other reckoning about race and class caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Shortly before corporate America decided to proclaim its concern about Black lives, plenty of corporations were in the news for reneging on promises to give hazard pay to the disproportionately Black and brown workers who had been designated as “essential.” The sharp turn to DEI initiatives had the added advantage of deflecting attention from the erupting class dynamics exposed in the opening months of the pandemic, when nearly 40 million people lost their jobs by some estimates, and debates raged over emergency supplemental unemployment and moratoriums on evictions. The corporate pivot to DEI emphasized vibes; pay increases, workplace safety, health care, and sick pay faded into the background.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Republican Party were honing a different narrative that would help them regain momentum after a humiliating electoral defeat in 2020: Diversity and equity initiatives were proof that the Democrats and their surrogates in corporate America were willing to put their thumbs on the scales to help Black people, even if it meant discriminating against whites.
The Republican Party’s base among poor and working-class whites has changed significantly in the past decade or so. The economic downturn in rural areas, combined with hospital closures and the growth of low-wage jobs without health insurance, has led to a much wider use of Medicaid in these areas. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to millions of people, including low-income white Republicans. This has complicated the right’s age-old strategy of demonizing those who rely on welfare-state programs. Previously, the right wing had mostly heaped blame on “welfare queens” living high off government handouts at the expense of hard-working, tax-paying white families. But now, needing to appeal to lower-income whites who were more likely than before to rely on government programs, the right made Black professionals in both the public and private sector the new enemies. The attacks on diversity initiatives in higher education and corporate America are aimed at middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Americans. The Trump administration is inviting whites, especially white men, to blame their stagnating or declining living standards on the supposedly rising fortunes of Black people.
This narrative was used to justify the Trump administration’s assault on the federal workforce. Last May, in a memo titled “Merit Hiring Plan,” a Trump official echoed right-wing conspiracy theories about the federal government using racial quotas to guide its hiring practices. The memo explained how “the overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats.” Not surprisingly, the Trump layoffs within federal agencies have hit Black civil servants, particularly women, the hardest. Black women lost 318,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and April of last year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during that period. According to The New York Times, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the workforce, such as the Department of Education and U.S. Agency for International Development, suffered some of the largest workforce reductions, if not complete elimination. After the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of employment attorneys alleged that the Trump layoffs “disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Trump administration took down the website allowing the public to track the race and gender of government employees.
The claim that civil rights protections and diversity initiatives have led to the displacement of white men from the workforce is another manifestation of the right wing’s great replacement conspiracy theory. This “theory” is mostly associated with Latinos and immigration, but it was also a motivating factor in the massacres of Black people in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Buffalo, in 2022. Of course, the idea that Blacks are taking over and supplanting the rightful place of whites is no less absurd than the immigrant variant. Yet it serves a purpose for the MAGA right in giving white working-class and poor people a scapegoat on which to blame their deteriorating living conditions, especially now that Trump and the Republicans have been in power for a year and have achieved nothing for the “ordinary” people they claim to stand for.
If racist scapegoating can get a hearing, it is because something has happened to white working-class people, along with the rest of American workers. The causes have been widely discussed: The decline in U.S. manufacturing and erosion of union strength over decades has led to sharp declines in earning power and material deprivations across the board. To manage this decline, Americans have taken on a record $18 trillion in household debt. Meanwhile, the affordability crisis grows worse and worse.
This is the context needed to understand the economic insecurity that pervades the lives of all working-class and poor people — Black, brown, and white. During the past decade, the media began to focus on one facet of this crisis of working-class life: “deaths of despair.” In the popular view, this referred specifically to working-class whites without college degrees aged 45 to 54 who died from opioid abuse, alcoholism, or suicide. But from 2015 to 2022, the rate of “deaths of despair” among Black Americans tripled, ultimately surpassing the rate among whites. Even beyond the statistics, though, the accusation that this tragic product of social malaise and economic marginalization was somehow caused by civil rights law or diversity initiatives makes a mockery of the profound levels of hardship afflicting all working people, which have led to a decline in overall life expectancy in the U.S., sharper than any other country in the developed world.
The right wing has had help in perpetuating the idea that civil rights laws have gone too far. In the case of the Democrats, it is their silence that speaks volumes. Worried about losing potential white swing voters, the party leadership said little after the U.S. Supreme Court, now packed with right-wingers, abolished affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. They have had even less to say about Republican attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as a justification for removing civil rights protections for Black workers and students. The Democrats’ appeal to Black voters is mostly focused on the threat to voting rights. But with their silence about other issues, they give credence to the Republican talking points that antiracist protections have come at a cost for white men.
By imagining that civil rights protections take something from white men, not only are the causes of white deprivation obscured, but the role of discrimination in Black economic subordination is also lost. The 20th century civil rights struggle for Black Americans was as much about opening the robust post–World War II economy to Black workers as it was about addressing the indignity of racial insults and stigma of inferiority. Or as Martin Luther King Jr. explained in 1963, “The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. … The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities.”
The eventual passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act removed formal legal barriers to the full participation of Black workers in the then-booming U.S. economy. But King and others recognized that more was needed to ensure equal Black participation in all aspects of the economy. They called on the federal government to be proactive in helping Black families out of the poverty imposed on them through decades of racial discrimination. As King observed:
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.
King understood that proposing such a program for Black workers would be untenable in a world where millions of white people were also living in poverty. So in the aftermath of the 1963 March on Washington, he called instead for a “special, compensatory measure” for all the financially marginalized. He compared the scale of such a program to the GI Bill promised to veterans when they returned to the U.S. after World War II. King recognized that “millions of white poor” would also benefit from this kind of social legislation. He described poor whites as “the derivative victims” of slavery: “They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education.” Discrimination, King continued, “has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.”
Some aspects of King’s insights are dated. Today, financial precarity and insecurity exist among a much wider layer of white workers, not just among those mired at the bottom. Also, King’s vision flowed from the existence of an expanding U.S. economy that created the modern white middle class. That economy no longer exists. Instead, millions of workers suffer declining living standards while historic levels of wealth are concentrated at the top of society. Racial attitudes have undoubtedly changed since 1963, though the pandering of Vance and Trump shows that racist scapegoating can still be effective. Perhaps an even bigger change is how Black American life has transformed in the past 60 years. The end of legal discrimination and federal enforcement of civil rights laws in the 1960s opened paths to upward mobility for some Black Americans. No one in King’s day would have imagined the number of Black millionaires and those making over $100,000 today. From the record number of Black Americans serving in Congress to the emergence of a small but significant Black elite, some aspects of Black life are unrecognizable compared with 60 years earlier.
But the shared reality of economic uncertainty and insecurity for millions of Black and white Americans alike — along with millions of others — provides the basis for the kind of political movement that King envisioned. Various individuals and social groups have long used race for their own objectives, whether in pursuit of reactionary or progressive goals. Today’s wealthy, Ivy League–educated white men blaming anti-discrimination policies for the declining living standards of ordinary white people is no different. Challenging this scapegoating and the destructive right-wing program it seeks to advance will require a mutual understanding of the grievances we share and a commitment to come together and fight to turn the tide against Trump.
Trump lashes out at Michelle Obama in inflammatory post
Nicole Charky-Chami
May 12, 2026
President Donald Trump reacts after delivering remarks during his second 'Rose Garden Club' dinner in honour of Police Week at the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 11, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump got personal on Tuesday, posting a video attacking former First lady Michelle Obama and praising Vice President JD Vance.
Trump shared the video clip on his Truth Social platform. It said "watch the difference in thinking" and featured different cuts from frank conversations around parenting and life in the White House, and juxtaposed them in a split-screen targeting Obama's comments. It aimed to "contrast" Obama's statements with Vance's remarks on family life, taking a swing at the Democrat and "the perpetual victims, that the left are, where they see oppression in everything."
The president has often taken jabs at Michelle Obama and her husband, former President Barack Obama, during and prior to the 2016 presidential campaign, throughout his first presidency, and after leaving office. He has criticized their policies, statements and appearances. A post he shared in February on his Truth Social platform depicting Barack and Michelle as animals has been condemned, despite the president defending it.
Trumpland is a Man’s World
It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington — or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice.
While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both — no surprise — were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Meanwhile, speculation lingers about the possible firing of a fourth female cabinet member, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the second woman to hold that job. And whether or not Gabbard is formally dismissed, she has recently been effectively sidelined, as her absence from White House meetings on the war in Iran suggests.
Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently tweeted, “Well… first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi… it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”
Equal Opportunity Failure
Crockett has a point. Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of Defense (now all too appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who disagreed with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) appointees, and is now exerting his leadership in a war against Iran for which the exit strategy seems elusive at best, despite his assurance that, as the Guardian reported, “the U.S. would not get bogged down in the conflict.” The U.S. operation, he insisted, was not a “democracy-building exercise,” adding that ‘this is not Iraq. This is not endless.’”
Hegseth’s behavior has led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file articles of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least 165 people, including many children, at a girls’ primary school in Iran hit by a U.S. missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has followed up with a letter to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.
Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, recently exposed in a piece in The Atlantic describing “excessive drinking” that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately filed suit for $250 million in damages), or the trashing of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it’s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was weaponized and transformed into President Trump’s version of a homeland militia. It’s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts.
So far, in Trump’s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held children in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, attacked peaceful protesters, and killed citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem appropriated tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, “Break Our Laws, We’ll Punish You.” (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)
Bondi’s ouster followed failures of a different order — namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump’s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to accusations that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, prosecutions under her watch of federal prosecutor Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.
And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor Trump banner that hung from its office building demonstrated).
Female Purges
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now — no surprise — been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women generals in the military. And only this month, we learned that Secretary of War Hegseth had reportedly removed two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.
Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Trade Commission and the CDC.
This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let’s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It’s worth noting as well that, under Biden, the Deputy Attorney General and the Deputy Secretary of Defense were both women.
Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of eight women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider reports, he was “thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.” Following the removal of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions — admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only 13% of all cabinet-level positions.)
Project 2025
It’s worth noting that the path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we’re now witnessing in real time, didn’t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a Project 2025 report entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy. It called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn’t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing “gender equality” language from government websites, emphasizing “family planning,” and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.
Although Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump’s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically erased from government websites. So, too, protections for women’s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has reported, as of January 2026, “53% of [Project 2025’s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.”
And now, there is a brand-new Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years” calls for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and “revive the institution of marriage.” Signaling its message, the report makes the case for privileging marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single-parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.
MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and University of Massachusetts professor Amel Ahmed summed up the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: “the freedoms fought [for] and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem.”
Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could “grab them by the pussy,” has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of $83.3 million in damages, a decision upheld by an appellate court; a secretary of war, whose earlier leadership of Concerned Veterans for America led to a report about the mistreatment of women during his time at the helm, and who was accused of sexual assault, leading to a civil suit in which he reportedly paid out damages to his 17-year old victim. And let’s not forget that Trump’s first nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the Epstein files. While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly being pressured to resign over his alleged ties to Epstein.
A Future Government Without Women?
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.
When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the U.S. Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a reporter to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She summed it up as a case where Stefanik “gets shafted,” while Waltz “gets rewarded.” For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: “She’s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.”
Greene’s dissatisfaction wasn’t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only one Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.
The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn’t realize it before, you really can’t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting with abandon females, as well as people of color, immigrants, and critics of the president. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.
America’s Un-Christian Autocracy
The intersection of religion and politics is a sensitive realm, but the global conversation has undeniably arrived there. The recent conflict between the Pope and the US President was not a personal tiff or a celebrity feud. Fundamental principles of 21st Century authoritarianism drive explicit rejections of core Christian beliefs. Specific actions of Donald Trump that are otherwise difficult to understand fit well with these rejections. One can draw a straight line from doctrine to apostasy to behavior.
According to the philosophical godfather of 21st Century dictatorship, Carl Schmitt, politics is about the distinction of friend versus enemy, and “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism.” He maintains this is not about mere competitors, for “the antagonist intends to negate his opponent’s way of life…” Friend and enemy “refer to the real possibility of physical killing.” This enmity is present for any group involved in politics and, implicitly, lack of intent to kill makes one politically nonexistent. (p. 26-33, Concept of the Political)
Not shrinking from the implications for Christianity, Schmitt asserts that when Jesus told his followers to love and pray for their enemies (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27) he did not mean political enemies. This might pass for ordinary philosophical hairsplitting, except that the tradition includes a fairly decisive illustration of the intended meaning. Jesus is tortured to death by a foreign empire and yet, at the moment of his death, prays forgiveness for executioners who have no personal reason to kill him. Schmitt falsifies the teachings of Jesus to excuse his own concept of politics as murder delayed.
Drawing the line across to the actions of today, Mr. Trump’s sermon on hating one’s enemies was not impulsive or frivolous. At the memorial service of Charlie Kirk, one of Mr. Trump’s most valuable supporters, Erika Kirk embraced the core message of her faith by publicly forgiving her husband’s murderer. Mr. Trump essentially spit in her face, eliciting a chorus of boos from the audience by insisting that he does not forgive. He hates his enemies. Here, he gives fair warning to a key constituency. He does not need their support. Politicians need constituencies. Dictators abuse everyone.
Another core autocratic idea is that, in commanding the state, authority is all and truth nothing. In support of this Schmitt focuses on miracles as the test of sovereign power. European kings were able to perform miracles, he asserts, because they could decide what was a miracle. “Auctoritas, non Veritas. Nothing here is true: everything is command. A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subject to believe to be a miracle…Miracles cease when the state forbids them.” Further, he argues that it is a mistake for government to allow people to have freedom of thought and belief even within the confines of their own private thoughts. Enforcing outward belief is not good enough. The sovereign commands even the inner lives of its subjects. (p. 54-7 The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes)
When Mr. Trump depicts himself as Jesus Christ performing a healing, he is not delusional. He is claiming turf in people’s souls. If he shows himself miraculous, he is. If he says it is not a miracle, he is not backing down, but doubling down.
Religion is more than doctrine. Being spiritual, the spirit of the thing matters. Christianity is largely defined by divine forgiveness of sins, but has largely held at least the Ten Commandments (of all the many laws laid down in the Jewish tradition) to be enduring rules for earthly behavior. Some denominations hold that one is saved from sin, once and forever, at a single moment of conversion. It is hard to think of any sect or theologian that transposes this framework directly onto purely human relations. What Christian tradition permits mere mortals to forgive earthly criminals in advance of their crimes?
Yet Schmitt, having argued that all modern political thought is secularized theology, held that sovereign government essentially forgives itself for all crimes beforehand. It is the exception to all rules. (p. 1-10, Political Theology) Somehow, he still spoke as if government had some sort of responsibility, an obvious contradiction.
When the Trump administration tells ICE officers that they are completely immune from the law, it pretends to forgive their crimes in advance. When it trains them to violate the Constitution (as a former trainer, turned whistleblower, has revealed), it indoctrinates them to criminality paid for by their victims’ taxes, ordained and sanctioned from on high – but not genuinely all that high.
Mr. Trump’s proposal to erect a golden idol of himself in the land of Baal is, of course, somewhat different. No theory of dictatorship is needed to see him writing himself into the role of the villain in numerous Biblical stories.
Christianity rarely declares anything heretical in our times, but there is no better candidate than the teachings of Carl Schmitt and his acolytes. The politics of murder, the divinity of dictators, and the doctrine of permanent self-forgiveness, all clash with the faith, and are all illustrated by the current President. Implications for adherents to the theory of the exception are profound. The primary locus for promotion of this thinking in the United States is the Federalist Society. Six out of nine Supreme Court Justices are associated with Federalist. Six Justices are Catholic. Four members of the Court are both.
Still, as often happens, poets tell it better than priests, politicians, or lawyers. John Milton was a great advocate and defender of republicanism but, as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s administration, he had a front row seat on the degeneration of England’s “The Revolution of the Saints” into an outright dictatorship. Bitter years later, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, he describes how Satan, the fallen archangel, discovers his trade. Traveling across the void toward Earth, he lingered for a while in the company of Chaos and Night where he learns to sow contradiction and uncertainty, and so, “by confusion rule.”
Satan must learn the implements of chaos and darkness because, as a creature of heaven, he has no prior knowledge of what evils might plague mortal beings. His own fall was driven not by any sordid desire, but by rebellion against heaven. Like the new model dictators of the 21st Century, he was victim of the sin that came before sin. He envied God.
