How Trump’s racist agenda harnesses opposition to DEI and antisemitism

The US government has become increasingly explicit with its racism during the second Donald Trump administration.

During a summit at the White House on May 21 with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump openly promoted conspiracy theories claiming that a genocide of white farmers was underway in South Africa. A day later, on May 22, he announced that he would be disallowing the enrollment of foreign students at Harvard University, which has rebelled against the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

US media responded immediately with reports stressing the lack of any basis for the claims of a “genocide” of white South Africans, while the decision to bar the registration of international students was suspended after only a few hours when a court accepted Harvard’s request for an injunction.

But the two episodes are symbolic in the sense that they show the overt levels of racism apparent in the US since Trump returned to office in January. In particular, they illustrate the opposition to diversity and antisemitism that have been key elements of the racist approach of Trump’s second administration.

The racist roots of Trumpism

Trump’s racist behavior has come under discussion ever since his days as a real estate developer in the 1970s. A real estate company that he ran in that era ended up facing a trial over discrimination against Black renters.

As he began eyeing a political career in the 1990s, the racist remarks kept coming. As recently as 2024, he continued asserting the guilt of five Black teenage boys who were arrested over the 1989 sexual assault of a white woman in Central Park but were ultimately acquitted in 2002. He was also one of the main figures spreading conspiracy claims insisting that Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was not actually eligible to be US president because he had not been born on American soil.

During the 2016 presidential election, Trump made blanket statements characterizing Mexican immigrants as sex offenders. The roots of his anti-DEI policies were visible in his remarks at presidential debates, where he insisted that he would do away with “political correctness” — a term that emerged in the US in the late 1980s to describe culture and values showing consideration for minorities, and one that goes hand-in-hand with DEI policy.

Trump’s statements won him the support of lower-middle-class white people with lower degrees of educational attainment — people who perceived themselves as “real Americans” and felt disgruntled over being worse off socioeconomically than non-white people and immigrants. What developed from there was a form of “Trumpism” that centered on white nationalist sentiments and an “America First” mentality that repudiated an international role for the US.

The racist sentiments that began resurfacing during Trump’s first term (from January 2017 to January 2021) reached their apex with a riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, 2017.

In addition to the traditional white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, a demonstration opposing the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee — leader of the Southern forces in the US Civil War — drew new racist contingents including neo-Nazis and members of the so-called “alt-right.” Beyond expressing opposition to non-whites and immigrants, the participants also chanted antisemitic slogans such as “Jews will not replace us.” Multiple injuries and one death occurred.

In his comments on the events, Trump avoided denouncing the far-right racist figures spearheading the demonstrations. “I think there’s blame on both sides,” he said at the time. “You had people that were very fine people on both sides.”

The situation drew an intense backlash from the Jewish community, which was shocked by the antisemitic rally.

Afterward, Trump began reestablishing opposition to antisemitism as a political tool. He was also in a position of urgently needing to voice strong condemnation of antisemitism to unite Israel-supporting evangelicals as a strong support base. As a result, he began portraying any and all criticism of Israel as being “antisemitic.”

Combining anti-DEI attitudes with opposition to antisemitism

At this point, opposition to DEI and antisemitism became a central focus of the racist attitudes characteristic of Trumpism. Trump went on to lose the 2020 presidential election, and as the arrival of the Joe Biden administration in January 2021 led to stronger pro-diversity policies, discontent rose among Trump’s support base and white conservatives in general.

DEI policies are designed to provide social opportunities without discrimination on the basis of one’s race, gender or ethnicity. They can be seen as the product of anti-discrimination policies that stretch all the way back to the abolition of slavery in the 19th century and, more recently, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Upon his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, former President Joe Biden signed an executive order to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, thereby making DEI an official government policy.

Trump and his supporters attacked DEI policies as being what they claim to battle: discrimination based on one’s race, gender or ethnic identity. Trump argued that in hiring or academic admissions processes, selectively favoring one race over others results in qualified white people being discriminated against.

After the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by excessive police force during his arrest, in 2020, a new movement defined by “wokeness” arose that sought to eradicate discrimination based on race and gender. This prompted even further backlash against diversity initiatives.

Opponents argued that the woke movement was forcing its ideology on racism on others and trying to make those who disagreed with it feel guilty.

During the following presidential election, Trump ran on a platform of anti-DEI and anti-wokeness.

Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, issued a “counterrevolution blueprint” for eliminating “left-wing racialism from the federal government.”

“Trump can end these programs under his executive authority and replace DEI with a policy of strict color-blind equality,” Rufo wrote. “This action would deliver an immediate shock to the bureaucracy.”

Rufo revealed that he has interacted with the Trump camp’s policy team since the summer of 2020.

Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, but his supporters were furious at what they believed was a loss caused by voter fraud. The MAGA movement regrouped and grew stronger. The outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023 provided an opportunity for Trumpism to use the opposition to antisemitism as a kind of racism. Trump has labeled anti-Israel, pro-Palestine protests on university campuses as antisemitic.

Antisemitism is a form of discrimination against Jews that has deep roots in the world of Western Christianity. However, conservative American Jews and the Republican Party characterize those protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians as antisemites.

Trump has proactively exploited this sentiment, equating DEI with antisemitism.

The Trump administration’s accelerating racism

After securing his second term, Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office, Jan. 20, that reversed Biden’s executive order on DEI. As a part of his anti-DEI initiative, Trump reshuffled Charles Brown, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Black man, in February. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had claimed that Brown had been appointed as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs thanks to Biden-era DEI policies, despite not being qualified for the job.

The Trump administration’s anti-DEI agenda went full throttle when it came to colleges and universities. It demanded that schools do away with their diversity initiatives, report on and carry out measures to prevent anti-Israel and pro-Palestine protests, and has cut federal subsidies to schools that dare to disobey. Starting with Columbia University, a flashpoint of protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza, colleges and universities across the country began to bend the knee to Trump’s demands.

But things changed when Harvard refused to yield to Trump’s demands last month. The university’s president, Alan Garber, who is Jewish, wrote in an open letter that “although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.” The Trump administration responded by immediately freezing US$2.29 billion in grants to the elite university. Harvard’s act of defiance inspired other schools to join it in resistance, growing the battlefield on which the Trump administration will have to fight.

Then there’s the billionaire Elon Musk, who exerted considerable influence during the early days of Trump 2.0 as the head of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” where he fired government workers and contractors en masse and instituted anti-DEI policies.

Musk, who is originally from South Africa, constantly harped on about the plight of white South Africans, who he said are being discriminated against and forced off their land. Since taking office, Trump himself has parroted these claims, saying that white farmers in South Africa are being discriminated against in numerous ways, including having their land taken away from them.

As far as the Trump administration’s ban on Harvard enrolling foreign students, the consensus is that the courts will almost certainly strike it down. Yet Trump continues to push the policy because he knows how stoking the racism-rooted conflict and division in American society rallies his base.

By Jung E-gil, senior staff writer