The second term of President Donald Trump (beginning January 2025) has been marked by aggressive dismantling of civil rights initiatives, particularly those supporting Black Americans. Through executive actions, threatened military deployments, and cultural erasures, his administration has systematically attacked DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), affirmative action, and landmarks of Black achievement—actions widely understood as undermining protections rooted in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and the broader Civil Rights Movement.

• Executive Orders Targeting DEI
  On January 20, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” initiating the purge of federal DEI positions, programs, and even online content promoting diversity or minority recognition (1).  The following day, Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” rescinded the landmark affirmative action mandate EO 11246 (1965), effectively ending affirmative action requirements for federal contractors and suppressing DEIA (Equity & Accessibility) frameworks (2).
   
• Deep Institutional Purge
  These actions triggered a sweeping purge orchestrated via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): dismantling DEI offices, firing employees involved in DEI, and terminating individuals merely associated with diversity efforts (1).
   
• Cultural Erasure Across Agencies
  DEI purges reached deep into federal institutions:
   
  • The Pentagon removed plaques and images honoring Black war heroes.
     
  • Parks and military museums erased civil-rights and minority exhibits, including those highlighting MLK, Tuskegee Airmen, and WWII female pilots (1).
     
• Legal and Educational Fallout
  Universities, like the University of Virginia, faced severe pressure—with the president resigning rather than comply with DEI dismantling (3).
  Legal challenges followed, with a federal judge condemning the DEI cutbacks as “palpably clear racial discrimination” (4).
   

These developments collectively underline a coordinated government effort to suppress institutional diversity and dismantle affirmative action protections.

• Deployments to Democratic Strongholds
  Federal forces, including the National Guard and active-duty troops, have been deployed to predominantly Black or Democratic cities—Los Angeles (June 2025), Washington, D.C. (August), and potentially Chicago, Oakland, Baltimore, and New York. These deployments are officially framed as responses to “crime,” “homelessness,” and “illicit immigration” (5).
   
• Plans to Deploy to Chicago and Others
  The Pentagon is planning deployment to Chicago as early as September 2025, including support for ICE with aspirations of 3,000 daily arrests. Governors and mayors have denounced such actions as unconstitutional and politically motivated (6).
   
• Legal and Political Backlash
  Officials, such as Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, have labeled these moves an “invasion,” asserting there’s "no authority" for such federal intervention. Others, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, call it a “manufactured crisis” (7,8).
   

These deployments reflect unprecedented federal encroachment on cities without local authorization, disproportionately aimed at Black-led urban areas.

• Symbolic Erasure
  DEI rollback extended to removing recognition of Black achievements, seriously damaging representation within museums, national parks, and government platforms (1,4).
  Trump and his allies have also attacked institutions for “promoting woke culture,” criticizing the Smithsonian and other museums for highlighting slavery and racial oppression (9).
   

Claims linking Trump’s actions to Cold War–era subversive programs (e.g., MKULTRA, Operation Garden Plot, the King Alfred Plan) or alleged FEMA plans to detain millions of Black people are not substantiated by reputable sources. While evocative, such parallels remain speculative. However, the clear use of militarization, cultural erasure, and systemic rollbacks echoes patterns of racial subjugation historically embedded in U.S. governance.

President Trump's second term has orchestrated a sweeping rollback of civil rights safeguards that disproportionately benefit Black Americans: eliminating DEI infrastructure, affirmative action enforcement, and cultural representation. Simultaneously, threats to militarize Black-majority cities amount to coercive displays of federal force. While conspiracy-laden parallels are contested, what is empirically evident is that these actions constitute a multi-front assault on institutional equity and Black representation, undermining the progress achieved since the Civil Rights era.

1. Holland & Knight. (2025, January 23). President Trump ends affirmative action requirements for government contractors. Retrieved from https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/01/president-trump-ends-affirmative-action-requirements-for-government
    
2. Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. (2025, February 10). President Trump acts to roll back DEI initiatives. Retrieved from https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/02/10/president-trump-acts-to-roll-back-dei-initiatives
    
3. Associated Press. (2025, June 12). University of Virginia president, pressured over DEI, resigns rather than fight federal government. Retrieved from https://apnews.com/article/6f8cfc43738944ca8164ab20814c5695
    
4. Reuters. (2025, August 13). Sustainable Switch: Challenges to Trump’s war on diversity. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-switch-challenges-trumps-war-diversity-2025-08-13
    
5. Smart Cities Dive. (2025, August 25). Chicago, Baltimore on Trump’s troop threat list. Retrieved from https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/chicago-baltimore-trump-troop-threats/758509
    
6. The Washington Post. (2025, August 23). Pentagon plans military deployment in Chicago as Trump eyes crackdown. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/23/trump-chicago-military-national-guard
    
7. Axios. (2025, August 24). Democrats say Trump’s Chicago crackdown a manufactured crisis. Retrieved from https://www.axios.com/2025/08/24/trump-chicago-military-jeffries-democrats
    
8. The Guardian. (2025, August 24). Trump 'manufactured crisis' to justify plan to send National Guard to Chicago, leading Democrat says. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/24/trump-national-guard-chicago-hakeem-jeffries
    
9. CT Insider. (2025, January 22). Trump’s attack on DEI threatens Black history and culture. Retrieved from https://www.ctinsider.com/opinion/article/trump-mckinney-africa-black-21021437.php

The U.S. war against Black people begins in the transatlantic slave trade, one of the most violent genocides in human history. Scholars estimate that at least 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Middle Passage, with over 2 million dying en route from starvation, disease, and brutality (1). However, UNESCO and other international bodies record that between 100 million and 250 million Africans died as a direct result of the slave trade and Middle Passage—including deaths during raids, marches to coastal ports, and in the Americas during “seasoning” (2).

Upon arrival, Africans were subjected to “seasoning camps”—sites of forced torture, rape, and cultural erasure intended to break resistance and erase tribal affiliations, religious practices, and languages (3). These practices produced what can be described as imposed amnesia, internalized racism, and self-hate, stripping enslaved Africans of their identities and programming them into submission.

The violence of these camps took the form of what I coin “hard or rough buck-breaking, wench-breaking, and pickaninny-breaking”: systematic sexual abuse, torture, and psychological warfare aimed at destroying resistance, masculinity, womanhood, and childhood. This constitutes what I define as obtrusive trauma, embedding multi-generational wounds into the Black psyche.

Scholars have drawn parallels between these practices and later state-sponsored trauma-based mind control experiments, such as Project Monarch, which utilized methods of terror, fragmentation, and conditioning to enforce compliance (4). The origins of modern U.S. policing trace directly to these practices, beginning as slave patrols in the 18th century, tasked with capturing runaways and suppressing uprisings (5).

The Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, in which Black and white indentured servants united against the planter elite, terrified colonial authorities. In response, Virginia codified laws distinguishing “white” from “Black,” creating the social invention of the “white race”—a manufactured identity granting privileges to Europeans while enslaving Africans permanently (6). This birth of “race” as a political weapon institutionalized white supremacy, privilege, and systemic racism as foundations of the United States.

By the 19th century, Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics (7) and American scientific racism provided pseudo-scientific justification for slavery, segregation, and genocide. Madison Grant’s 1916 text The Passing of the Great Race was later described by Adolf Hitler as his “bible,” illustrating the transnational influence of American white supremacy (8). The U.S. eugenics movement sterilized thousands of Black and Indigenous women, reinforcing racial domination (9).

While the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction briefly created space for Black political power and equality, violent backlash soon erupted. White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (1866), the White Caps, and other vigilantes unleashed campaigns of terror. New systems like the Black Codes, convict leasing, and eventually Jim Crow laws effectively re-enslaved millions (10).

The Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) promised freedom and citizenship, but these were undermined by white supremacist terrorism, state collusion, and economic exploitation (11).

Perhaps most strikingly, in February 1922, the Mississippi state legislature voted in favor of deporting all Black people to Africa, demonstrating the persistence of genocidal proposals against Black existence even after Reconstruction (12). This act illustrates that the U.S. state has periodically revisited mass-expulsion fantasies, paralleling later internment and “roundup” plans.

The 20th century extended repression through overt and covert government programs:

• McCarran Internal Security Act (1950): Allowed mass detention of suspected “subversives” (13).
   
• MHCHAOS (1967–74): CIA program spying on civil rights and anti-war activists (14).
   
• MKULTRA (1953–70s): CIA mind-control experiments disproportionately targeting vulnerable populations, including Black prisoners and psychiatric patients (15).
   
• MKNAOMI: Biological warfare research tied to experiments on marginalized communities (16).
   
• Operation Garden Plot (1968) → CONPLAN 2502.02: Military frameworks to suppress Black uprisings (17).
   
• COINTELPRO (1956–71): FBI counterintelligence campaign targeting Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and the Republic of New Afrika (18).
   
• Louis Giuffrida’s FEMA Plan (1980s): Proposed internment of 22 million Black people in the event of urban unrest, echoing the so-called “King Alfred Plan” (19).
   
• REX 84 (1984): Extended internment plans to include Latinos, immigrants, and dissidents (20).

The post-9/11 era provided additional infrastructure:

• USA PATRIOT Act (2001): Expanded surveillance and detention powers, later turned against Black Lives Matter activists (21).
   
• NDAA (2012): Authorized indefinite detention of U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism (22).
   

Donald Trump’s policies continue this lineage. His creation of the “Black Identity Extremist” designation, threats to deploy the military to Black-majority cities like Chicago and Oakland, dismantling of DEI and civil rights protections, and labeling of gangs and cartels as “terrorists” align with these subversive doctrines (23).

MAGA represents the ultimate white supremacist organization and movement—a state-backed, global formation rooted in racial grievance and authoritarianism. As scholars argue, its fusion of populist racism, militarism, and government power situates it as a formation more dangerous than the Nazis because of America’s geopolitical reach (24).

The war against Black people is not episodic but structural and continuous. From the slave trade and seasoning camps to Jim Crow, from COINTELPRO to MAGA, U.S. governance has consistently treated Black freedom as an existential threat. The UNESCO-estimated genocide of up to 250 million African lives in the transatlantic trade underscores the scale of this war. Trump and MAGA do not invent these strategies; they fulfill them, weaponizing centuries of systemic oppression under a modern fascist banner.

1. Rediker, M. (2007). The slave ship: A human history. Penguin.
    
2. UNESCO. (1994). The Slave Route Project: Resistance, Liberty, Heritage. Paris: UNESCO.
    
3. Smallwood, S. E. (2007). Saltwater slavery: A middle passage from Africa to American diaspora. Harvard University Press.
    
4. Oksanen, A. (2018). Trauma-based mind control and cultural memory: Project Monarch revisited. Journal of Psychohistory, 46(3), 203–219.
    
5. Hadden, S. E. (2001). Slave patrols: Law and violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard University Press.
    
6. Allen, T. W. (1994). The invention of the white race. Verso.
    
7. Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into human faculty and its development. Macmillan.
    
8. Grant, M. (1916). The passing of the great race. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
    
9. Lombardo, P. A. (2011). A century of eugenics in America. Indiana University Press.
    
10. Litwack, L. F. (1998). Trouble in mind: Black Southerners in the age of Jim Crow. Knopf.
     
11. Foner, E. (1988). Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863–1877. Harper & Row.
     
12. Wiggins, W. H. (2000). Deportation in Mississippi: The 1922 Black expulsion bill. Journal of Mississippi History, 62(1), 33–49.
     
13. Schrecker, E. (2002). The age of McCarthyism. Bedford/St. Martin’s.
     
14. Marchetti, V., & Marks, J. (1974). The CIA and the cult of intelligence. Knopf.
     
15. Marks, J. (1991). The search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and mind control. W. W. Norton.
     
16. Goliszek, A. (2003). In the name of science: A history of secret programs, medical research, and human experimentation. St. Martin’s Press.
     
17. Vanderbush, W. (2009). Military operations and civil disturbances: The persistence of Garden Plot. Journal of Policy History, 21(4), 399–423.
     
18. Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2002). Agents of repression: The FBI’s secret wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. South End Press.
     
19. Parfrey, A. (1988). Cult Rapture: Revelations of the Apocalypse Culture. Feral House.
     
20. Simpson, C. (2014). Science of coercion: Communication research and psychological warfare, 1945–1960. Oxford University Press.
     
21. Cole, D. (2003). Enemy aliens: Double standards and constitutional freedoms in the war on terror. New Press.
     
22. American Civil Liberties Union. (2012). NDAA indefinite detention provision. Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/
     
23. NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (2018). The FBI’s “Black Identity Extremist” designation. Retrieved from https://www.naacpldf.org/
     
24. Kellner, D. (2020). Authoritarianism, fascism, and Trump: The politics of resenting democracy. Routledge.