"It is like gravity being reversed": How Trump's DOJ created "an invitation to discrimination"

Donald Trump is America’s first White president. He is advancing a revolutionary project to end multiracial pluralistic democracy. As a practical day-to-day matter, this means protecting the power, influence, and privileges of white people over Black people and other non-whites.

The evidence about the role that white racism and white racial resentment played in Donald Trump’s return to power is overwhelming: contrary to the disproved narrative, it was racism and not “working class” anxiety that overdetermined white support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

Donald Trump was able to use that energy to fuel his ascent back to the White House, where he is now “governing” as an autocrat who has aspirations to be a dictator. In a 2018 op-ed essay in The New York Times, Charles Blow described this appeal as: “Trump is man-as-message, man-as-messiah. Trump support isn’t philosophical but theological. Trumpism is a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy.” As such, Donald Trump will (and is) amplify his racist policies and behavior to maintain control and power when/if he faces pushback from the American people.

Donald Trump’s authority and power are being used not just against non-whites but against white people — including his own MAGA people — as well. To that point, Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that is being forced through Congress by his supplicant MAGA Republicans will take away hundreds of billions (and likely trillions) of dollars from the country’s social safety net by cutting programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act and then transferring it to the plutocrats and kleptocrats. As President Johnson so wisely observed and warned, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

Ultimately, the power of white elites to use white racism and white racial resentment to influence and otherwise convince and compel white Americans to support policies and engage in behavior(s) that actually causes them harm is older than the nation itself.

Damon Hewitt is the President and Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Before joining the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Hewitt served as lead counsel on litigation and policy matters and supervised teams of lawyers and non-lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dewitt explains how the struggle to defend democracy and civil rights in the Age of Trump will be a marathon and not the sprint of a few years between elections and campaigns. He also explains how if American democracy was a type of medical patient, they would be very sick and in need of long-term, sustained care because the rise of Trumpism and authoritarian populism reflects much deeper acute systemic problems.

Dewitt warns that the Trump administration’s assaults on democracy, freedom, democratic institutions, civil rights, the rule of law, and the Constitution will not be limited to just “those people” (i.e. “illegal aliens,” “migrants,” Black and brown people, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups) but will soon target the American people as a whole with drastically negative consequences for most, if not all, areas of their lives.

How are you feeling? How are you managing on the day-to-day given the worsening state of American democracy and rising authoritarianism? You lead an organization that is committed to defending civil rights. You are literally at ground zero right now.

It is challenging. This crisis is a test of our collective stamina for what is a marathon and not a sprint. I think about my work as being part of a generational struggle. The baton was passed to us, and we’d best not drop it. Defending civil rights can be exhausting — and that is in the best of times. But as I tell my team here at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, “we must have joy amidst the struggle.” I said that before Trump's return to power, and that principle is much more important now. There is a profound sense of urgency among those who are working in this space in civil society. We are not in a moment where we can just wait three and a half years, and things are automatically going to get better once we have a new president. Part of the approach to stopping these assaults on democracy, the rule of law, and civil rights is a type of harm reduction model. We are trying to slow down that overflowing sewer, the flooding of the zone.

You summoned the type of therapeutic language that is necessary to understand that this American democracy and society are very sick and in pain. Using that framework and metaphor, if America in the Age of Trump is the patient and you are the doctor, how would you assess its health?

That is an amazing metaphor. Very powerful. As I see it, the patient has probably gone to an urgent care center when they actually need to see a specialist — or more likely multiple specialists. The patient needs to have an entire program of care, but they have been avoiding the doctor because they are afraid to do the work of taking care of themselves properly. They don't want to take the medicine or follow through on the treatments because it won't be easy. The patient does not want to change their diet. Getting better is going to require lots of hard work, and it is going to hurt. But guess what? If the patient stays sick, it is going to hurt even more. Denial is very powerful in America. There are large numbers of people and institutions who actually believe that they can just put their heads down and it will all be fine. It won't be. A big part of the denial is not realizing or admitting that you can continue to get sicker, that your health can devolve, the disease can and likely will get worse if left untreated.

One of the largest and most critical mistakes that the mainstream political class and news media types continue to make, years into the Age of Trump, is to not understand how Trump's ascent is the result of much deeper and far older problems and systemic failures in this society. This is more than a failure of imagination, it is a choice at this point.

One of the root causes of this crisis is deep social inequality and financial precarity. There was a time when having a high school diploma and getting a job with a pension was a formula to be part of the solid middle class in this country. Now, a college degree or even an advanced degree is often a formula for little to no upward economic mobility. In the United States, we have a generation of young people who are now much less likely to be better off than their parents economically. We are mired in reverse social mobility. If one believes that progress in this country is linear and upward, such a reality is jarring and enraging.

This helps to explain why there is a cohort among the American public who is attracted to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Both of them are very different in terms of politics and values. However, they both symbolize and channel rage at a system that is not working for a larger and growing number of Americans. And of course, racism is a deep part of the rise of Trumpism and the MAGA movement. The data is clear in that regard. Racism is not just a stain on the American social fabric, it is a deep and indelible part of that fabric. The inability of law and public policy in this country to keep up with the shifting, evolving manifestations of racism is leaving a lot of people disaffected as well.

Looking at the white backlash and white frontlash, the rolling back of decades of progress along the color line, I have been asking myself what year is it really? Do Trump and his MAGA forces and their allies want to return the country to the 1950s? The Gilded Age? Even earlier? As the joke goes, Black people can't really mess with time machines. That is also true of many other groups, too — even if they are in denial about how precarious their rights and freedoms and personhood truly have been historically and continue to be in this country.

Here is a thought experiment: Tell me a year when hundreds of 1000s of people took the streets in peaceful protest, when elected officials obstructed justice when it came to racism, when the President of the United States had to take to the airwaves to talk about the importance of voting rights not just for Black people, but all people in the country, when people who fought for racial justice had to worry about their physical safety and surveillance. That year was 1963. That is the year the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was founded. But what I am describing could have been any of the last few years, too.

You are correct. It does feel like we are in a time warp in this country right now, and in the last few years. It is very disorienting. Trump's election, twice, is also a reminder that social progress is not linear and that the country's democratic institutions and infrastructure are more fragile than many of the country's leaders — as well as average Americans — wanted to admit. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction. Reconstruction was one of the most radical and successful experiments in expanding democracy in American history. The civil rights movement and its victories were a second Reconstruction. The United States is going to need a third Reconstruction to begin to heal from the damage that is now being caused and the deeper problems that got us to this democracy crisis.

To that point, Black Americans and other nonwhites have only been equal citizens under the law in this country for about 60 years.

One can make a compelling argument that the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were the nation's birth certificate. America as a modern nation was born from those laws, and the project of democracy has been expanding access and protecting all Americans and their right to the franchise. That was only 60 or so years ago. America's experiment in democracy is very young. The American democratic experiment and its fruits and legacy are very much imperiled now.

I have also been thinking a great deal about the work of the legal scholar Lani Guinier and her concept of "political race" and how Black and brown people are the miners' canaries in American society. She passed away in 2022. A great loss. What does it mean to be the "miner's canary" in the Age of Trump and his return to power?

I was a research assistant for Lani Guinier during my first year of law school. To be the miner's canary means that the experiences of Black people are a prism through which to see a whole wide range of inequalities, beyond race, in this society. Inequality and other forms of marginalization and identity overlap and intersect. We have tons of data and all manner of empirical and other forms of evidence that show how race and racism structure American society and people's life outcomes and other opportunities and experiences. But to the miner's canary, if we make conditions better for the canary to survive, if not thrive in that metaphorical mine, we are making it better for just about everyone else too. The harsh reality about the miner's canary is that it often ends up dying. That is the signal for everybody else to get out of that mine right now because the air is poisonous. Black people are the miners' canaries in American society who are dying younger and at higher rates from a range of causes directly and indirectly related to racism and other forms of inequality and oppression. And guess what? Those premature deaths are a warning to everyone else. We are interconnected.

Black people were that miner's canary warning, very loudly, that Donald Trump's return to the White House would be a disaster for all Americans and an existential threat to the future of the country's democracy and freedom. There were other alarm-sounders as well. For example, the relatively small number of people with a prominent public platform who kept trying to warn the American people about what would happen if Trump was elected to a second term. How come those tens of millions of Americans who put Trump back in the White House did not listen to these grave warnings — warnings that have now come true?

I will preface my answer by saying that the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is a non-partisan organization. Looking at the data, I have concluded that the 2024 election was largely decided by how a few million people who voted for the Democrats in 2020 decided not to vote at all this time. Trump also won a larger percentage of the Latino vote. He also expanded his base marginally among young black men. There are also single-issue voters who ignored all of the other, much more important issues regarding the future of American democracy and our rights and freedoms. Trump would tell Black Americans, What do you have to lose by voting for me and not the Democrats? Well, it turns out a whole lot.

Those Black folks who switched over to Trump were a marginal but key part of his victory. However, we cannot and should not ignore how Donald Trump won a majority of white women. He has now done this three times. We need to ask white women as a group how they can continue to support Donald Trump given his personal behavior and values, the "Access Hollywood" tape, his treatment of Hillary Clinton and then Kamala Harris and powerful women more generally? Trump's support for taking away women's most fundamental civil rights to control their own bodies? How does a woman look her daughter in the eye and tell her she voted for such a man?

What is the state of the rule of law right now in this country?

The rule of law has been exposed as being much more fragile than was commonly believed or hoped. The law is the connective tissue of our society and institutions, and norms. Our democratic system works because the leaders respect the opinions of the courts even if they do not personally agree with them. Donald Trump and his administration and the right-wing have increasingly rejected those norms about how the law works in the American democratic system. It is different, but perhaps the closest analog might be so-called "massive resistance" in the South and some other parts of the United States to the mandate of Brown v. Board of Education, where school districts refused to integrate, sometimes they were shutting down entire schools or districts to avoid compliance. There were even these fake legal theories known as "interposition" to resist the courts' orders about civil rights.

Donald Trump as president, has repeatedly shown that he only cares about himself and not preserving, upholding, or protecting the country's democratic institutions, of which the rule of law (and equality under it) and justice are central. I have been speaking with retired federal judges about what could potentially happen if the executive branch loses in court and then refuses to respect the outcome. Or what if an officeholder loses an election and refuses to respect the people's will? Their answers were not comforting. At the end of the day, we still rely on the collective instinct of a few good people in the right places so that things don't fall apart in this country and our democracy. But it could all easily collapse. It has happened many times in other countries. The rule of law is not on strong ground with Trump 2.0. That’s why we must all devote a good deal of attention and energy to upholding it and fighting back against efforts to erode it.

What is your reaction to how the Trump administration has remade the Office of Civil Rights to focus on protecting the supposedly trampled-upon rights of White right-wing Christians and "oppressed" white people more broadly?

This is about much more than just a simple shifting of policy priorities. That happens with new administrations and is relatively routine. What the Trump administration is doing is turning empirical reality and the facts upside down. It is like gravity being reversed. The Civil Rights Division has long been known as the crown jewel of the Department of Justice. The reason that the Department of Justice was created was to enforce federal civil rights laws. What the Trump administration is doing is taking away the avenues for redress and protection for people who have suffered real injustice and violations of their rights. Moreover, the actual laws and procedures that have been developed over decades to protect the civil rights of marginalized people — and by extension all people in this country — are being weaponized to serve Trump and the larger radical political project that seeks to take away equality under the law for all people.

For example, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been waging a campaign of threats and over-the-top rhetoric to falsely imply that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits efforts by K-12 school districts and colleges to further diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. By issuing threatening press releases, diatribes masquerading as policy guidance, current OCR leadership is not trying to enforce the law. They are actually trying to remake the law by elevating their own warped interpretations of Supreme Court precedent in the recent higher education admissions cases to cover nearly every aspect of school environments.

At the same time that the Department of Education is engaged in this campaign of intimidation requiring school communities to scramble, and teachers and administrators to be fearful, the Department of Education has also shuttered 7 of its 12 regional civil rights offices, leaving school communities in Texas, Ohio, California and many other states without anyone to call when a child faces discrimination at school. This simultaneous weakening and weaponization of civil rights infrastructure has left school districts are scrambling to meet the Department's demands while at the same time leaving parents and students who have been bullied at school because of their race, or are not receiving necessary services in relation to a disability, with no one in government to call for assistance.

In another attack on multiracial, pluralistic democracy, the Trump administration recently ordered that the Office of Civil Rights reject what is known as “disparate impact” as evidence of racism and other forms of discrimination. They have also ended investigations and monitoring of police thuggery and brutality and other abuses of the civil rights.

While destroying and subverting the civil rights infrastructure, the administration also aims to unravel essential civil rights legal frameworks for addressing modern-day discrimination. Today, structural racism built into the norms and policies of institutions is harder to prove as intentional disparate treatment, but it can be proved through a legal standard called disparate impact. The Supreme Court first recognized disparate impact as a form of discrimination in 1971 and has since repeatedly upheld cases brought under that standard. Disparate impact liability is an essential tool that has been utilized for decades to enforce civil rights protections for individuals who are harmed by policies that appear neutral on their face but which are shown to erect barriers to opportunity for people from certain groups.

Through Executive Order, the Trump administration has claimed that disparate impact liability is unlawful. It has called for immediate repeal of all “racial nondiscrimination” regulations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that contemplate disparate-impact liability, directed agencies to assess pending investigations, lawsuits, and consent judgments that rely on disparate-impact liability and deprioritize enforcement of claims alleging disparate impact discrimination, and directed the Department of Justice to target state laws, regulations, policies, or practices that relate to disparate-impact. The administration's aim here is to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country — to erode guardrails preventing discrimination in housing, lending, employment, education, healthcare, and other areas of life. It’s like declaring “open season” for racism — an invitation to discrimination.

Recently, the Trump administration turned reality and facts upside down again when it abandoned ongoing Justice Department investigations into police misconduct in cities all across America. This sweeping announcement even included two cities–Louisville and Minneapolis–that had already voluntarily agreed to make critical reforms to their police policies and practices to mitigate instances of police violence against its citizens. This police misconduct was not speculative, it was reality. We know this because the Justice Department thoroughly investigated these police departments and then made its findings public.

The timing of this announcement makes these actions even more troubling. The Trump administration made this announcement just days before the five-year mark of the lynching of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Officer, and on the same day, Trump claimed that South Africa engaged in genocide against white Afrikaner farmers. Make no mistake, the Trump administration is making clear its view about whether Black lives matter. But upside down or not, a fact is still a fact. The findings from those police misconduct investigations cannot be easily swept under the rug.

If the Trump administration and the larger revolutionary right-wing, as seen with Project 2025 for example, gets its way, what will America look like? What do you want to prepare people for?

In the infamous Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Justice Taney, speaking for the majority, said that the Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect. Well, that's how everybody in this country is going to feel. You will have no rights that Trump and the federal government are bound to respect. If you are an American citizen or if you have legal status to be in this country, you could be picked up off the street or taken from your home and put on a plane to some foreign prison. Sure, there are provisions in the Bill of Rights and Constitution prohibiting such a thing, but the Trump administration doesn't care about that. It may start there, and many Americans will incorrectly convince themselves that they are "good people" and haven't committed any crimes, so they are safe. They are not. Once one group is targeted or fundamental rights are taken away, then it is a slippery slope. Again, this is why the treatment of Black people in America is like the canary in the coal mine. The mistreatment of Black people is a harbinger of the mistreatment of all Americans.

Voting rights will be taken away next. The Republicans and their allies on the state and local level are already systematically targeting the voting rights of Black and brown people — and white people as well — who support the Democratic Party. Many people in this country are going to learn the painful lesson that once the government says that you have no rights it is bound to respect that not just their political freedoms and civil rights will be constrained by their ability to have a happy life and to be fulfilled if not thrive will be taken away too. The destitution will not just be political and moral, it will be economic too. Under such an autocratic, if not outright authoritarian regime, the rich get richer and the poor get even poorer, and the middle class shrinks and disappears.