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Trump's unchecked racism reveals just how fragile the state of American democracy is.
Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group
Trump’s Racism Carries No Consequences—And That’s Scary
Mar 22, 2026
Donald Trump posted a video online depicting the Obamas as apes.
This isn’t shocking—or at least it shouldn’t be. Trump has built an entire political career out of saying the quiet racist part out loud and then daring the country to do something about it.
From housing discrimination in the 1970s and the Central Park Five ads to birtherism and comments about “shithole countries,” the man has been running the same racist playbook for decades. This is the same man who told congresswomen of color to go back where they came from and warned that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. At this point, treating any of this as shocking requires a kind of practiced amnesia.
Depicting the first Black president and first lady as apes is racist, dehumanizing, and offensive in ways that aren’t exactly subtle or remotely original.
Still, the current president of the United States sharing this video matters—even if he ultimately deleted it.
And what happened next matters more.
Where’s the pushback?
This latest episode, which occurred in the first week of February, is not just another entry in America’s long, ugly scrapbook of anti-Black dehumanization. It’s a stress test—a very simple one, really, of how much open anti-Black cruelty American institutions can sustain while still pretending this is a democracy.
History suggests the answer is “quite a lot.”
To be fair, a handful of Republicans objected to Trump’s racist AI slop. Eleven Republican members of Congress by my count, managed to locate both their conscience and a microphone. Some of them even managed to say the word “racist,” which in modern Republican politics is akin to setting yourself on fire.
But here’s the problem: Nothing happened next. Nothing changed.
As with so many past examples of outrageously deviant behavior by the chief executive, this moment was brushed aside as simply another example of Trump being Trump—filed away as background noise rather than as a political event with political consequences.
But the relevant question after Trump posted the offensive video was never whether a few people could locate their conscience for long enough to issue a press release. The real question was whether any of it would produce consequences that meaningfully altered Trump’s standing inside the GOP.
It did not.
The mainstream media behaved as if a few Republicans who registered their disapproval became evidence that our democracy is healthy. We saw headlines about Republican “pushback” and stories about internal tension.
The New York Times described an “unusually strong and public outcry,” as though a few sentences of disapproval from a tiny fraction of the GOP was meaningful. Al Jazeera called it an “outpouring of bipartisan condemnation,” which seems hyperbolic when 97 percent of Republican officials said nothing.
Republican leaders absolutely know the imagery Trump shared is racist. They are not confused. They are not misinformed. They are making a calculation. And the calculation is simple: angering Trump’s base is more dangerous than tolerating Trump’s racism.
So they tolerate it. Again and again.
By the time you read this, the media will have likely moved on. After all, every day in the Trump administration brings a fresh hell and even open racism struggles to hold the public’s attention. Trump is historically extreme in both cruelty and contempt for the political norms that once constrained even the most harmful presidents. So why am I even writing about it? Shouldn’t I just move on?
No. Because this is how normalization actually works. Not through silence, but through consequence so weak it barely registers. A little dissent. A few headlines. Some sternly worded tweets. And, in this case, a defiant president who once claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters actually being forced to delete a racist post (after first defending it and trying to shuffle the blame onto a White House aide).
And then everybody goes back to pretending the restraints that once limited this behavior still hold.
They do not.
Cruelty is no longer bad politics
Take former President Ronald Reagan. In 1971—nine years before he assumed the presidency—he was recorded on tape laughing with President Richard Nixon and describing a United Nations delegation from Tanzania as “monkeys.” The remark remained hidden for decades.
The National Archives eventually released the tape in 2000, but the racist language was redacted. When the full remarks were finally released in 2019, Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, tearfully took to the pages of the Washington Post to defend her father, claiming that the language was an aberration rather than evidence of how power actually spoke behind closed doors. (I beg to differ.)
Evidently, past presidents who used racist language were clearly forced into apology, distance, or damage control. Trump mostly avoids these pressures, beyond deleting a post and refusing to apologize for it.
So, yes, everyone understands that depicting the Obamas as apes is racist. And still, only 11 congressional Republicans could be bothered to condemn it. Trump hasn’t lost any standing in the GOP as a result of it.
That’s where the real danger lives—not in Trump’s cruelty, and not even in his contempt for rules or law, but in the steady erosion of the political norms that once made certain behavior disqualifying for any politician, much less for the president. American institutions have now demonstrated a willingness to treat even this level of norm violation as politically survivable.
Racist leaders make racist policies
Once cruelty becomes politically survivable, the consequences do not remain confined to spicy internet discourse and barbs thrown between elected officials. They migrate into policy—and eventually into law.
For decades, civil-rights law has recognized a basic reality: Discrimination doesn’t always announce itself with a slur or a white hood. Sometimes it shows up as a “facially neutral” policy—one that does not mention race on its face—that just so happens to keep producing racially unequal outcomes. This is known in legalese as “disparate impact.”
The Supreme Court established the concept of disparate impact in Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971, which concerned the legality of requiring written intelligence-and skills-based tests that effectively precluded Black employees from advancing beyond low-level jobs. (Yes, there was actually a time the Supreme Court behaved as if it understood how racism works.)
Trump has now taken aim at that doctrine. In April 2025, he issued an executive order that tells federal agencies to stop enforcing disparate impact liability wherever possible. An executive order can’t magically erase statutes or Supreme Court precedent. But it can signal how aggressively—or whether at all—the law will be enforced.
Taken together with Trump’s assault on school and workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—which he tried to outlaw in a January 2025 executive order—a pattern begins to emerge. If Trump’s policies on disparate impact liability become reality, Black plaintiffs—facing the kind of housing or employment discrimination that is rarely confessed out loud—will struggle to prove discriminatory intent in court.
This has obvious disadvantages for Black people. And it has a corollary advantage for white people, because white plaintiffs can point to diversity or equity programs as affirmative evidence of intentional discrimination against them. The result is a civil-rights framework turned inside out, one that makes inequality harder to challenge and white grievance easier to vindicate. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies insist this inversion is what fairness actually looks like.
This is what consequence-free racism looks like once it moves from speech into the law. And it becomes harder to fight once it gets there.
Reconstruction rides again
This isn’t an abstract legal debate. It’s happening right now. Reconstruction-era civil-rights statutes—written to guarantee Black Americans the same rights as white citizens—are now being used in ways that make it easier for inequality to continue against Black Americans.
Examples include legal efforts to shut down programs intended to remedy racial exclusion, such as the successful legal challenges to investment programs like Fearless Fund, created to address the historic exclusion of Black women entrepreneurs from venture capital, as well as the recent prosecution of Black journalists covering protest, like Don Lemon.
Laws designed to dismantle white supremacy are being repurposed to police the people still targeted by it. Because in the United States, even the laws designed to fight white supremacy can eventually be repurposed to defend it, provided you wait long enough and hire enough lawyers.
None of this is unprecedented, of course. After Reconstruction, the Constitution technically promised equality, while Jim Crow and the KKK made a mockery of it. American history is full of moments where rights existed on paper while disappearing everywhere else.
What feels different during Trump’s presidency is not necessarily the racism. It’s the shrug.
A meaningful slice of the electorate keeps rewarding his racist behavior. Political leaders keep accommodating it. Media institutions keep normalizing it. And democracy—supposedly—keeps functioning.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth at the center of all this: American democracy has always depended on voluntary restraint. On powerful people choosing not to do the worst thing they were technically allowed to do.
What the Trump era has revealed is how fragile that arrangement really is.
Because once abandoning restraint and trafficking in open racism carries no real consequence, the guardrails don’t fail dramatically. They just stop existing. And when the guardrails are gone, the law does not remain neutral. It reorganizes itself around the new reality. If that new reality is old racism, the question stops being whether the system is once again bending toward white supremacy.
The question is whether anything in the system still exists that can bend it back.
Trump’s Racism Carries No Consequences—And That’s Scary was originally published by Rewire News Group and is republished with permission.
Imani Gandy is Co-Chief Content Officer for Rewire News Group.
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Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, Dolores Huerta, August 16, 2025 in Austin, Texas.
.(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Sexual Assault Thrives in Silence
Mar 21, 2026
Dolores Huerta broke her silence 60 years after Cesar Chavez had assaulted her. In her statement, Dolores Huerta said, “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work”. She did not want to hurt the movement.
After 15 years of working with survivors and supporting domestic violence and sexual assault programs, I know this instinct well. Most survivors do not want to rock the boat or damage the reputation of leaders, bosses, or ex-partners. Speaking up can mean destabilizing families, workplaces, and entire communities. Survivors will deny their own pain to protect institutions and the people they care about, especially in oppressed and marginalized communities.
Latinos in the U.S. are already stereotyped as criminals and rapists. No one wants to contribute to this narrative. No one wants this to be true of their heroes, sons, friends, and neighbors; there is too much at stake.
Closer to home, here in San Francisco, Jon Jacobo, a community leader was accused of having assaulted several women. In many ways, I see parallels in which accusations against a charismatic leader divide a community between those who think “there’s no way” he could do that and those who believe the survivor. Often, the community has more concern for the person being accused of the assault and ruining their lives, vs the concern for the victim and how their lives are never the same after the assault.
And yet there is hope. I am relieved that the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the Chavez family are not denying these allegations and standing on their values. And that many in the Latino community are siding with survivors even when it means reexamining their views of revered figures. That shift matters.
Standing up and telling your story is the bravest thing a survivor can do. There is always the fear of not being believed. Professionally, I supported dozens of women who were assaulted while working in the fields, by employers, by co-workers, and by family members. Most of the women I worked with were undocumented, and their immigration status was used to coerce their silence. There were also bystanders who knew of the abuse but chose to do nothing out of fear of retaliation.
As I read the stories of Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas recalling how they were groomed and abused by Cesar Chavez, I could not help but wonder what would have happened if they had come forward as teens. Would they have been believed? Abuse is made possible in silence. Abuse is reinforced when abusers are protected by religion, culture, and status. Society is complicit and creates environments where abuse is enabled.
Personally, I grew up in Christian community and was taught to “not bear false witness” and to not cause men “to stumble”. I was also taught that sex before marriage was a sin.
So, when I was in middle school, and one of my friends was gang raped, members of the church questioned why she had those friends in the first place. She was judged instead of protected.
As an adult, these experiences stayed with me. When I experienced abuse firsthand, I didn’t confide in anyone in my Christian community because how do you talk about assault when you’re not supposed to be having sex in the first place? The conversation about consent, and its lack, gets thrown out the window. And the assailants walk away, shielded from accountability because the community would often see survivors suffer rather than leaders disgraced.
Dolores Huerta’s decision to come forward now matters. No matter how long she lived with this secret, she was brave enough to tell her story. It's because of her and others that more of us will come forward, regardless of who, when, where, and what the circumstances of the assault were.
Because at the end of the day, what is a justice movement without justice for women?
Elisabet Avalos is a leader in housing justice, developing programs for survivors of violence experiencing homelessness, and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project on Domestic Violence and Economic Security.
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US Capitol
US Capitol
Constitutional Barriers to Nationalizing Elections
Mar 21, 2026
In the run-up to the midterms, President Trump continues to call for nationalizing congressional elections. He has sought to initiate the process through executive orders, such as one proposing to set “a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day for all methods of voting.” The words and spirit of the United States Constitution—the bedrock textualism and originalism of conservative constitutional interpretation—say he can’t nationalize elections.
Unlike some consequential constitutional questions, it’s not a close call.
The Constitution’s framers and ratifiers weighed the idea and firmly rejected it. For example, Pennsylvania arch-nationalist Gouverneur Morris was appalled that his state did not impose minimum property-ownership qualifications for voting. As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he pressed for their imposition nationwide for congressional elections. Morris drew James Madison into his camp but failed to persuade many others, leaving a notable paper trail of his failure.
The Virginia Plan, which served as a starting point for the convention’s deliberations, did not include qualifications for suffrage. But, as the delegates worked through its various provisions, one of them suggested adding property-ownership requirements for members of Congress. Morris proposed instead imposing them on voters. “If qualifications are proper,” Madison reports Morris saying, “he would prefer them in the electors rather than the elected.” Although several delegates objected, Morris managed to have the issue of nationalizing congressional elections referred to a committee charged with drafting a constitution from the various resolutions passed by delegates for their final consideration.
Reflecting Morris’s concerns, the drafting committee’s records include debate over a proposal that the qualifications of voters would be the same nationally with regard to citizenship, manhood, sanity of mind, and possession of real property. At the time, ten of the thirteen states imposed property-ownership qualifications for voting in their legislatures. Most of these states imposed lower qualifications for elections to their assemblies or larger branches and higher qualifications for elections to their senates or upper chambers. No state allowed enslaved people to vote, and three southern states barred free Blacks from voting. Only New Jersey then allowed women to vote, but only single women could satisfy the state’s property-ownership requirement.
Rather than accept Morris’s proposal to impose uniform national qualifications for voting in congressional elections, the committee took the opposite approach. In all states, the first article of the committee’s draft states, the qualification of the electors for congressional elections “shall be the same … as those of the electors [for] the most numerous branch of their own legislatures.” In other words, in any state, those eligible to vote in elections for the state’s assembly could also vote in federal elections. This provision clearly and expressly left the matter to the states.
When this provision reached the full convention for consideration, Morris moved to strike it in favor of empowering Congress to set uniform national voting standards for federal elections. Madison and Delaware’s John Dickinson backed Morris’s motion, but a rising chorus of delegates from right, left, and center spoke against it.
Pennsylvania’s representative on the committee, the scholarly conservative James Wilson, reportedly declared, “This part of the Report was well considered by the Committee, and he did not think it could be changed for the better.” Virginia libertarian George Mason warned, “A power to alter the qualifications would be a dangerous power in the hands of [Congress].” Benjamin Franklin added that he did not think “the elected had any right in any case to narrow the privileges of the electors.”
Ultimately, only one state, Dickinson’s Delaware, supported Morris’s motion, and the final Constitution retained language virtually identical to the committee’s draft. Delegates then added a further clause to the Constitution expressly entrusting the time, place, and manner of holding congressional elections to the states, subject only to subsequent regulation by Congress. There is thus no express role for the president in congressional elections, let alone a grant of power for the president to act unilaterally.
The issue of national authority over congressional elections resurfaced during the ratification debates. Federalists assured supporters of states’ rights that the Constitution reserved such matters to the states. Even Madison followed the party line. In the Federalist Papers, he writes that nationalizing voting rights, “to have reduced the different qualifications in the different states to one uniform rule, would probably have been as dissatisfactory to some of the states, as it would have been difficult to the convention.” Responding to states-rights advocates at the Virginia Ratifying Conventions regarding the authority of Congress to regulate the time, place, and manner of voting, he added that such control “will very probably never be exercised.”
Following these clear constitutional strictures, subsequent nationalizing mandates on voting in federal elections have required either constitutional amendments or valid legislation. One bar states from restricting suffrage on account of race. Another does so on account of sex. A separate constitutional amendment prohibits states from imposing poll taxes in federal elections. Another provides that states may not bar persons age 18 or older from voting on the basis of age. Congress, meanwhile, has passed legislation governing the timing and manner of voting, such as setting a uniform date for congressional elections.
All of this makes one thing abundantly clear: under any mode of constitutional interpretation, presidents may not unilaterally impose their will on congressional elections. Absent express constitutional amendments or legislation on specific issues, the states run the show. Should the states or courts allow President Trump to usurp this central pillar of American federalism, elections will become yet another example of how the Constitution isn’t working.
Edward J. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning legal historian.
William Cooper is the author of How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.
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Smoke billows after overnight airstrikes on oil depots on March 8, 2026 in Tehran, Iran.
(Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
Unpacking War Powers in the U.S.-Iran Conflict: Who Decides When America Goes to War?
Mar 21, 2026
What Is The War Powers Resolution of 1973?
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 is a law enacted by Congress that limits the U.S. president’s ability to wage or escalate military operations overseas. Passed on November 7, 1973 amid the Vietnam War, the War Powers Resolution reasserts Congress’ constitutional power “to declare war” and “to raise and support Armies.” A key provision of the War Powers Resolution requires the president to submit a report to Congress within 48 hours of military deployment in the absence of an official declaration of war by Congress detailing:
- The circumstances requiring U.S. forces;
- The constitutional or legislative justification for the president’s actions;
- The estimated duration of U.S. involvement in the hostilities.
If Congress does not formally declare war or enact special authorization for continuation of the U.S’ involvement in a conflict within 60 days of the report’s submission, the president must withdraw U.S. troops from the hostilities. If Congress does declare war, the president is instructed under the War Powers Resolution to report to Congress periodically on the status of the hostilities no less than once every 6 months.
Since becoming law in response to President Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign aimed at North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia, the War Powers Resolution has been applied several times with varying levels of compliance from sitting presidents. Following the Mayagüez Incident (1975), President Gerald Ford abided by the Resolution with his submitting a report to Congress, while President George H.W Bush launched Operation Desert Storm in 1991 only after Congress passed the Iraq Resolution. Both the Clinton administration and the Obama administration violated the Resolution, letting U.S involvement in The Kosovo Conflict (1999) and The Libya Intervention (2011) continue past 60 days without congressional approval. Most recently, members of Congress have sought to invoke the War Powers Resolution following President Donald J. Trump’s decision to approve U.S. air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June of last year and U.S. air strikes on Venezuela in early January that preceded the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Both measures to pass resolutions curtailing President Trump’s power failed to receive majority support in the House and the Senate.
What’s Happening in Iran?
On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched air attacks on Iran in what President Trump deemed as an effort to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime” in a Truth Social post. With the strikes killing Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran pledged a severe response, going on to fire drones and missiles at Gulf countries with American military bases like Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The ongoing conflict, which the White House now calls Operation Epic Fury, has seen the deaths of 7 American service members and more than 1,000 people in Iran and the cancellations of more than 20,000 flights that were supposed to fly to or from the Middle East.
Why Did Lawmakers Want to Force a Vote?
After the U.S.-Iran conflict began, members of Congress vowed to force a vote on war powers resolutions that would prevent President Trump from taking further action in Iran without congressional approval. And although members of Congress were briefed by top national security advisors three days after the initial attack, some lawmakers remained concerned about the lack of an exit strategy and pushed for a vote. In the Senate, the war powers measure failed in a 47-53 vote, and in the House, by a 212-219 vote.
Who Supported the Vote?
Prior to failing in both the House and the Senate, lawmakers from both political parties had spoken out in favor of passing a war powers resolution, with some lawmakers calling the U.S.-led attacks on Iran “illegal and unconstitutional.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) asserted that it was the president’s obligation under the Constitution to ask Congress for permission to use military force. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) affirmed that the Iran situation lacked the “exigent circumstances” that would have allowed the president to act without congressional approval. Across the aisle, House Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) tweeted that the U.S.-Iran War was not in-line with Trump’s “America First” agenda as he joined Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) in forcing a vote in the House.
Who Opposed the Vote?
Prominent lawmakers like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) opposed a vote on a war powers resolution, stating that President Trump was within his Article II, Section II constitutional powers as commander-in-chief to direct the military to carry out the attack. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) also opposed the vote and argued that President Trump’s actions were meant to “settle the account with the Iranian regime.” In addition, Senator John Curtis (R-Utah) believed a war powers resolution would stop the president from being able to “cut off a threat before it becomes imminent.” One of the only Democratic voices to oppose the vote was Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who supported the president’s actions as a matter of global security.
What Are the Future Implications?
With both the House and the Senate failing to pass a war powers resolution that would have reinstated Congress’s power to declare war, the U.S.-Iran War is expected to continue, with President Trump projecting that the conflict could last four-to-five weeks.
Already, the impacts of the war have been felt worldwide, as QatarEnergy has halted production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) after being targeted by Iranian missiles which has caused European natural gas prices to surge by 40%. In the United States, gas prices jumped by 11 cents overnight, the largest one-day increase since 2022.
If Congress decides to revisit the War Powers Resolution amid the U.S.-Iran War and rein in President Trump’s military power, it is likely that President Trump would veto a bipartisan resolution, thus forcing Congress to accrue the two-thirds votes in the House and the Senate necessary to override it. The War Powers Resolution could also be challenged in court. While the Supreme Court has historically declined to rule on the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution, its enforceability remains on uncertain legal ground.
Unpacking War Powers in the U.S.-Iran Conflict: Who Decides When America Goes to War? was first published on The Alliance for Citizen Engagement and was republished with permission.
Stephanie Peterson is a senior at Purdue University Northwest.
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