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.