Trump's Heart Goes Out To White Male Victims Of *Checks Notes* The Civil Rights Movement
They're repeating this constantly for a reason.
Last week, Donald Trump did an interview with the New York Times that no one really paid much attention to. It came out on Wednesday, the same day an ICE agent shot a woman in the face three times and then called her a “fucking bitch,” like you do when you are heroically defending your very life from a middle-aged woman driving 0.2 miles an hour in a Honda Pilot. So Trump’s thoughts on renovating the White House were hardly at the top of anyone’s mind.
In this interview, as with every other time he opens his mouth or his phone, he said a wide variety of ignorant and hateful things. He talked about how delighted he was that children will soon be dying of deadly diseases like meningitis and hepatitis, threatened to attack Nigeria, and was, according to reporters Katie Rogers and Doug Mills, a “gracious host.”
How lovely.
He also had some things to say about the civil rights movement. Are you so excited to hear what?
When asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Mr. Trump said he believed “a lot of people were very badly treated.”
“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” he said, an apparent reference to affirmative action in college admissions. “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”
He added: “I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.”
This did not happen.
It literally did not happen. Even in cases where schools included race or ethnicity as a consideration in admissions, there were and are 87,000 other considerations that were and are biased towards white people. Legacy admissions, which favor white people. The fact that white people were (and are!) more likely to attend highly rated public schools and schools with a wide variety of AP classes, and extracurricular activities. The fact that participating in sports like fencing, crew and golf (as we learned from Operation Varsity Blues) gives a student an enormous edge in college admissions.
Granted, these things tend to benefit wealthy white students far more than poor white students (and class should absolutely be a consideration in admissions as well), but, thanks to historical iniquities, a far larger percentage of white students are well-off than are students of color. In fact, things have only gotten worse in this area.
According to data compiled by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC):
In 2022, the median White household held $284,310 in wealth, more than six times that of the median Black household at $44,100 and 4 times that of Hispanic households at $62,120. Black households have a wealth gap of 85% compared to White households, and Hispanic households have a wealth gap of 78%.
Gee, I don’t know, but it seems like white people are doing pretty okay! Is it that they just thrive in the face of all of this incredible adversity and “reverse discrimination,” or is it perhaps that there are still lots of white privilege to go around?
When it comes to jobs, we know for a fact that white people have an advantage. People tend to hire people who remind them of themselves (and are more likely to mentor them once they are hired), so given the fact that most people with that power for a very long time were white men, guess who they were hiring? They’re also likely to give more consideration to someone in their fraternity or sorority (still very much majority white, outside of specifically Black Greek organizations) or to the kid of someone they know or golf with.
And while things have improved a bit in this area, a resumé with a white-sounding name on it is still more likely to get a call for an interview than the exact same resumé with a Black name. (Unless that name is difficult to pronounce — swear to God, back when I was unemployed, I didn’t get any responses from places I applied to until I “changed” my last name to Penn, and there are studies backing this up as well. It’s all subconscious bias about the familiar vs. the unfamiliar.)
Oh! And you know who benefits the most from diversity programs, right? White women. So this idea that white people are somehow losing out due to civil rights laws really only makes sense if you believe that white people are inherently entitled to every job on earth.
The idea that, outside of “diversity hires,” everyone who gets a job is always the “most qualified” is straight-up nonsense. Hell, Donald Trump exclusively hires unqualified people that he just happens to like personally. You think Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel got their jobs through “merit”? Really?
If anything, the reason white men have clung so hard to this narrative is because they cannot compete on a slightly more even playing ground. They have to create a fictional narrative in which they didn’t get the job they wanted because an “unqualified” Black lesbian got it instead, to protect their own egos.
In fact, the real big irony here is that, for several years now, schools have actually been accepting men at higher rates than women in order to keep a more balanced gender ratio. Right now, women outnumber men at colleges by 40 percent, and that number is going to increase by a lot should the schools abide by Trump’s directive to not consider race or gender in admissions.
The big fear that bigots have always had, with regard to equal rights, is that those they have oppressed will turn around and do the same thing to them, as revenge. Why? Because that is exactly what they would do. In fact, it’s what they’re doing now. They think that if they repeat often enough that they are the real victims of discrimination (indeed, the only victims of discrimination) that eventually everyone will go along with them and they will then be the recipients of all the empathy and goodwill and understanding they believe women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and others have unfairly siphoned from society. They want their traditional power, along with the social power they believe victims of (frequently their own) discrimination have been wielding against them.
They know they can’t get away with their old ways of oppression quite as well these days, because they know it will end more poorly for them than it will for those they are trying to keep down. The only way they see to get their power back is to claim that everyone else is oppressing them. To repeat it ad nauseam to the point that it feels true, even though it obviously isn’t. To give it as much credence as possible. To get those who don’t dig very deep on things to accept it as a true premise without question.
Hell, despite the fact that The New York Times did publish an article (mildly) critical of Trump’s idiotic viewpoint here, they also employ Christopher Caldwell, who wrote an entire book on this very premise, as an opinion columnist. A book largely credited as the genesis of much of this very argument. How is that for giving it credence?
On the bright side, this still seems completely absurd to most people. But if they’re going to hammer it on their side, we must hammer it on ours as well.
The reply sent to RFKjr by the German historian Rob Schafer should find its place in the...dunno...Smithsonian?.
"German Historian Schools RFKjr"
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/1/12/2362996/-German-Historian-Schools-RFKjr?
RFK Jr, lecturing a health minister in Germany: “Reports coming out of Germany show a government sidelining patient autonomy and limiting people's abilities to act on their own convictions when they face medical decisions. That is why I sent a letter to Germany's Federal Minister of Health, Nina Warken. In my letter, I made it clear that Germany has the opportunity and the responsibility to correct this trajectory, to restore medical autonomy, to end politically motivated prosecutions, and to uphold the rights that anchor every democratic nation.”
German historian Rob Schafer responded: “You seem to be laboring under the delusion that Germany is a colony for your conspiracy theories. Let me be blunt: Your brand of 'freedom' — the freedom to die of preventable 19th-century diseases — is an export we have no interest in buying. We established the world's first universal social healthcare system under Bismarck in 1883. You still do not have anything comparable.” ...
“We are the nation of Koch and Virchow and have spent 140 years using state power to defeat disease through science AND solidarity. You, meanwhile, preside over a system where insulin is rationed like gold dust and medical bankruptcy is a national pastime. The fact that you think you have the moral standing to lecture the country that invented modern medicine on 'medical decisions' is not just arrogant; it is grotesque! Keep your chaos on your side of the Atlantic. Mind your own business.”
“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,”
I still struggle to think that people can listen to this man and think he's not only possessed of a functioning brain, but that he's a genius.