The Trump administration is waging a war on Black Americans

This is an adapted excerpt from the May 4 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

This Video Is Trending Right Now →

Three months ago, Donald Trump posted a video online depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. He later took the video down but refused to apologize for it.

Five months ago, Trump confirmed something he had long denied. In his first term, reports emerged that during a 2018 White House meeting with senators, Trump had referred to Haiti and African nations as “s–––hole countries.” When those comments were first reported, Trump denied he ever used that language. 

But then a few months ago, he bragged, proudly, during a speech in Pennsylvania, that he had used that term — and that he still believed it. 

As is clear from the repeated daily news cycle, Trump and his administration have been bad at everything they have set their mind to. They’re terrible in the courts. They’re terrible in the court of public opinion. They’re terrible at the technocratic, practical stuff a government is supposed to do. They’re terrible at war and diplomacy. They’re bad at what they’re trying to do. Simply put, they’re not great.

But on race, on the treatment of African Americans, even being terrible at what they’re doing has still proved disastrous for the country. It’s not just posturing and messaging that validates and excites the worst bigots in the country (though it’s that too), but we’re now about 16 months into a concerted and intense targeting of Black Americans by the Trump administration. 

On his first day in office, the president proclaimed war on diversity efforts, not only in government, but in any institution in the country over which he can exert leverage, from schools to law firms to private businesses of every stripe.

He immediately started firing or trying to force out some of the highest-profile Black public officials in the government, seemingly regardless of any other criteria, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr.; the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden; Gwynne Wilcox, an attorney who served on the National Labor Relations Board; Robert Primus, a member of the Surface Transportation Board; Alvin Brown, who served on the National Transportation Safety Board; Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics; Willie Phillips, head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. 

When Trump and his top political donor, Elon Musk, then started just getting rid of huge swaths of the federal government, to disastrous effect, the biggest cuts targeted agencies that employed a disproportionate number of Black employees.

Reporter Erica Green wrote about this a few months ago for The New York Times, noting that nothing had moved backward in the federal government for Black Americans this quickly or this far in more than 100 years — since 1912, when President Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal workforce.

As Green reported of that earlier effort, “Black employees were fired or demoted to lower-level jobs, relegated to separate and inferior lunchrooms and other facilities, and accused of making white women feel unsafe.”

According to the Times, those who remained in the federal government were “humiliated.” Green cited a report that a Black worker in the Postal Service was “surrounded by screens so white workers would not have to look at him.”  

“Another employee had a cage built around him to separate him from his white counterparts,” she wrote. “A clerk in the Treasury secretary’s office was assigned to rewrite all correspondence to address Black employees by their first names.”

But in 2025 and 2026, this president and this administration are not just inheriting that history, they’re furthering it. 

Since 1965, all federal contractors have been banned, by executive order, from discriminating “on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.” Trump rescinded that 1965 rule on his first full day in office.

Less than a month later, the Trump administration announced another rule change, rescinding Clause 52.222-21 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is titled “Prohibition of Segregated Facilities” and reads: 

The Contractor agrees that it does not and will not maintain or provide for its employees any segregated facilities at any of its establishments, and that it does not and will not permit its employees to perform their services at any location under its control where segregated facilities are maintained.

This Video Is Trending Right Now 👇

Click here to watch the video

source WATCH THE CONTENT VIDEO

That clause has been in government contracts for decades. Trump rescinded it. Which means, as bluntly reported by NPR, that “the federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains.”