When Donald Trump most just lately ran for president, he made scores of guarantees to the American folks — however he’s solely stored one.
In 2024, political pundits and operatives noticed affordability as the important thing difficulty of the presidential marketing campaign. Trump actually performed it up: On the marketing campaign path, he pledged that he would carry down inflation and make groceries cheaper once more, and when he received, observers credited that technique for his victory.
However that’s as a result of the president’s actual marketing campaign promise wasn’t in regards to the financial system. As an alternative, it was all about racism.
He spouted dehumanizing lies about immigrants, dabbled in eugenics and pledged to conduct mass deportations. “After I win on November 5, the migrant invasion ends, and the restoration of our nation begins,” Trump said at a rally in October 2024.
When he received again to the White Home, he instantly started delivering on each the specific guarantees and the tacit implications.
Within the final 12 months, Trump has deported immigrants without so much as a trial, defunded government programs devoted to range and inclusion, and deployed thousands of federal agents to blue cities to wreak havoc on folks of colour and their allies.
“That is the federal government weaponizing the social and political opinions of the president,” William Roberts, the senior vp for rights and justice on the Middle for American Progress, a assume tank that promotes liberal insurance policies, advised HuffPost.
“It’s not simply ‘Donald Trump is a racist,’” Roberts stated. “It’s Trump’s authorities partaking in policy-making to hurt sure folks.”
Illustration: HuffPost; Photographs: Getty
There was a transparent through-line between Trump’s marketing campaign rhetoric and the worst excesses of his second time period: In the course of the 2024 presidential marketing campaign, a viral declare about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio — the place approximately 10,000 Haitians had arrived in recent times — additionally caught Trump’s consideration. He repeated the racist rumor throughout a presidential debate together with his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.
“In Springfield, they’re consuming the canine,” Trump said. “The people who got here in, they’re consuming the cats. They’re consuming the pets of the people who reside there.”
Trump’s operating mate, JD Vance, repeated the rumor and added claims of his personal, together with saying Haitians had been bringing diseases to Ohio. However Vance additionally basically admitted that he was mendacity.
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“If I’ve to create tales in order that the American media really pays consideration to the struggling of the American folks, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said in a September 2024 interview with CNN.
All of a sudden, Haitian immigrants across the U.S. were targets. Springfield, Ohio, faculty kids had been subjected to bomb threats, and in small cities in Pennsylvania and Alabama with vital Haitian populations, residents apprehensive for his or her security.
The truth that Trump confronted no penalties and as a substitute was rewarded with one other shot on the presidency has enabled much more blatant lies about marginalized, usually immigrant, populations — with lethal outcomes.
In December 2025, a viral video alleging fraud at Somali-run day cares within the Minneapolis space caught the eye of the Trump administration. Nick Shirley, the right-wing agitator who made the video, claimed that he had uncovered $100 million worth of fraud. (Minnesota officers investigated his claims and, throughout shock inspections, discovered that every one the day cares featured in his movies had been working as anticipated.) However nonetheless, Trump sent federal officers to “investigate.”
Earlier than the surge of federal brokers into Minnesota, Trump had been referring to Somalis, together with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), as “rubbish.”
“We might go someway, and we’re going to go the incorrect manner if we hold taking in rubbish into our nation,” he said at a Cupboard assembly final November.
“The administration needs this nation to be extra white. These are white nationalist beliefs.”
– Seth Levi, chief technique officer on the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle
However as president, Trump doesn’t merely should pay lip service to racist web rumors. He can use the total pressure of the federal authorities.
The Division of Homeland Safety deployed hundreds of immigration brokers to Minneapolis, which has the biggest Somali inhabitants within the U.S. Simply two days into what DHS known as its largest immigration operation ever, 37-year-old Renee Good, a white mom of three who gave the impression to be partaking in protest, was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, whereas sitting in her automotive.
She was solely the newest particular person to be shot by federal officers — becoming a member of folks like Kevin Porter, who was fatally shot in Los Angeles, and Marimar Martinez, who survived a taking pictures in Chicago — however her dying sparked widespread protests in Minneapolis and past.
ICE doubled down after Good was killed. Federal brokers have been noticed throughout Minneapolis, concentrating on folks, dragging them from their cars and utilizing pepper spray and other chemical irritants. The town’s public school system shut down for two days and is now offering remote learning for any households who’re too fearful to ship their kids to highschool.
And the federal government doesn’t make any secret of the philosophy behind the crackdown. The official X account of the Division of Homeland Safety regularly posts memes and songs popular with white nationalists and Nazis.
“Calling the whole lot you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson advised HuffPost in an emailed assertion. “DHS will proceed to make use of all instruments to speak with the American folks and hold them knowledgeable on our historic effort to Make America Secure Once more.”
“The administration needs this nation to be extra white,” Seth Levi, the chief technique officer on the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle, advised HuffPost. “These are white nationalist beliefs that we’ve seen within the fringes going again a long time nevertheless it’s changing into mainstream thought by the administration.”
In Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, immigrant communities and their allies have additionally been subjected to an unprecedented blitz, all previewed by Trump on the marketing campaign path.
In 2024, Trump stated that Aurora, Colorado, a Denver suburb, was a “war zone” being run by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based felony group. However even Republican officials in the city stated that the claims had been false and that Aurora was protected for households.
“It’s like an invasion from inside, and we’re going to have the biggest deportation within the historical past of our nation,” Trump said in September of that 12 months. “And we’re going to begin with Springfield and Aurora.”
Trump continued on with the fiction in his second time period by concentrating on Latino males throughout the nation and accusing them of being gang members, even when the proof was skinny. In March, the Division of Homeland Safety sent hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador identified for its human rights abuses. The lads had not obtained trials or sentences, and lots of had no felony information.
When advocates filed a lawsuit accusing immigration officers of illegally concentrating on folks primarily based on their race, the Supreme Courtroom — the place a full one-third of the justices have been appointed by Trump — ruled 6-3 to allow it. Ethnicity, wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his opinion, “generally is a ‘related issue’ when thought-about together with different salient elements.”
Photograph by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Photos
Past the violence that Trump has the ability to allow as president, there are trickle-down results.
“It does create a permission construction to say these items out within the open,” Levi stated. “These aren’t new emotions or beliefs, however folks used to acknowledge them as taboo and stored them to themselves.”
There’s proof that racist rhetoric from the higher echelons of presidency can influence the average American as properly. Hateful and bigoted rhetoric on-line increased after the 2024 election, and a December 2025 Gallup poll discovered that almost all Individuals imagine that political rhetoric has gone too far.
As Trump ramps up his deportation efforts, on a regular basis individuals are attempting to assist him. There have been multiple instances of individuals publicly helping deportation officers, together with by directing them towards immigrants.
“Jim Crow wasn’t held up solely with coverage but additionally by common folks,” Roberts stated, referring to the set of racially discriminatory legal guidelines, violence and social buildings that oppressed Black folks within the U.S. South for practically 100 years after the abolition of slavery.
In some ways, it could be too late to place this genie again within the bottle. Immigration enforcement is simply essentially the most seen and most up-to-date manifestation of the administration’s agenda.
Throughout his first days in workplace, Trump signed an executive order banning range, fairness and inclusion within the federal authorities. The administration rapidly went to work to fireside workers who did range work and dismantle applications that didn’t align with their worldview.
Though the chief order didn’t apply to non-public corporations, leaders within the sector adopted go well with and started pulling back from their DEI pledges as properly.
The assault on the federal government dealt an particularly big blow to Black workers, who’re overrepresented as federal workers as a result of public sector jobs have been historically extra welcoming to folks of colour.
Trump additionally signed orders that dismantled DEI in Okay-12 public colleges and better training institutes, whereas demanding elite schools flip over their race and admissions data. The administration has been utilizing allegations of antisemitism or claims race is being illegally used as an admissions issue to strain colleges into favoring a extra right-wing agenda, even because it places related pressures on college students themselves. Hundreds of worldwide college students have misplaced their skill to review within the U.S.
And DHS officers started concentrating on faculty college students with opinions it didn’t like, together with Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia College graduate pupil who led pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was arrested over his beliefs final March.
It’s all occurring with at the least the excuse, if not real perception, that Trump has a mandate from the folks. He made it very clear all through his marketing campaign that mass deportations, demonizing the opposite and accepting bigotry would dominate his second time period.
That is what they voted for. And that’s what has occurred.
“It’s actually emboldening folks to deal with people nevertheless they wish to,” Roberts stated. “[His policies] will resurrect lots of the racial animus that has at all times lived in America.”
Regardless of his lofty guarantees in regards to the financial system, inexpensive groceries and ushering in a brand new golden age, there seems to be just one true fixed of the Trump administration.
“Folks generally tend to overthink and overanalyze as a result of we don’t wish to settle for the obvious clarification that’s proper in entrance of us,” Levi stated.
“However when the administration is tweeting out Nazi memes and songs, I don’t actually assume there’s a nuanced scorching tackle that,” he continued. “They’re being fairly clear about what a few of their beliefs are.”
