by Daniel Johnson
May 4, 2024
In an interview with Time Magazine, Donald Trump said he believes that white people are being treated with bias on a wide scale.
In an interview with Time Magazine, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, said that he wants to crank up deportations using the United States military to do so, deploy the National Guard to deal with protests, gut the U.S. civil service, and that he believes that white people face anti-white bias, which Project 2025 also argues through describing affirmative action as affirmative discrimination.
In the sprawling interview, which was published by Time on April 30, Trump outlines his vision for America, which some have described as The Handmaid’s Tale melded dictator dreams. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley described a second Trump presidency to the magazine as a harbinger of the “the end of our democracy” and “the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.”
As Deadline reported, at an event on May 1, President Joe Biden called the long-form interview in Time a must-read. He told the crowd gathered at an Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander fundraiser at Washington D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel, “Trump did a long interview with TIME magazine. It’s coming out, you gotta read it. It’s a mandatory read. This election is about competing values and competing visions for America,” Biden added. “Trump’s values and visions are ones of anger, hate, revenge, retribution.”
In addition to his tacit support for the aims of Project 2025, a codenamed Republican Party project to reshape the whole of American government in the image of Trump, the GOP’s Republican nominee is firmly opposed to what he described as an anti-white bias.
“If you look at the Biden Administration, they’re sort of against anybody depending on certain views. They’re against Catholics. They’re against a lot of different people… I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either,” Trump said. “I don’t think it would be a very tough thing to address, frankly. But I think the laws are very unfair right now. And education is being very unfair, and it’s being stifled. But I don’t think it’s going to be a big problem at all. But if you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white [people] and that’s a problem.”
The Republican Party at large, have been engaging in a protracted push against DEI, the most emblematic of which is the controversy the party has stirred up around critical race theory. Critical race theory is basically a way of looking at American society through laws and other aspects of the American social structure that perpetuates systemic racism. Although the theory does not appear in any K-12 textbooks, it is mentioned in several proposals governing grade school education from Republican governors, like Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The Republican Party has also been targeting DEI policies and departments at institutions of higher education, claiming that they should not receive state funding because they are discriminatory in nature.
However, Civil rights leaders like Alvin B. Tillery, the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Diversity at Northwestern University and Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League see the activism of the Republican Party as part of a framework from the days of segregation. Morial told USA Today that the conservatives are “advocating for the return of white privilege” and that “They’re advocating for the policies that were used during a segregated America.”
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