No matter what Trump may claim, protecting civil rights doesn’t prompt reverse racism
When I read that the president had met with New York Times journalists at the White House and told them that civil rights led to white people being “very badly treated,” my jaw dropped.
The days when Black people couldn’t vote, ride on the front of public buses, be served at lunch counters, attend many schools, or sleep in hotels weren’t all that long ago. Thanks to the advocacy of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination based on race is now illegal.
But President Donald Trump would try to have us believe that the implementation of civil rights policies has hurt white people, when, in actuality, they make life better for everyone because they protect women, religious groups, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of different ethnicities and races from discrimination.
In Trump World, though, up is down and down is up.
News reports today often read more like satire from the Onion than real life. But journalists still have a responsibility to report on what comes out of the Oval Office, no matter how ludicrous.
So when I read that Trump had met with a small group of New York Times journalists at the White House and told them that civil rights led to white people being “very badly treated,” my jaw dropped. I read and reread what his actual words were, which included his saying, “White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well, and they were not invited to go into a university to college.”
Trump reportedly added, “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”
That’s like saying the rise of feminism and women’s rights hurt men. But wait, there’s more. Trump also is reported as having said: “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.”
He apparently was referring to affirmative action, which is rich considering white women are the largest beneficiaries of it. Same thing with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which were created to give historically marginalized workers, such as women, people with disabilities, African Americans, and veterans, better opportunities in the workplace.
This attempt by Trump at grievance politics to rev up his base rings hollow to sensible people who recognize that white men have always held the vast majority of upper-level positions in both the private and public sectors.
In contrast, Black people and Native Americans have always had the highest rates of unemployment. Despite advances, the wealth gap between white and Black people continues to be considerable. This past September, I wrote about how African American women have been the hardest hit by job losses since Trump returned to public office.
MAGA is big on accusing former President Barack Obama of supposedly dividing the country, while it is Trump who continually stokes racial division.
He kicked off his presidential campaign in 2015 by maligning Mexicans, saying: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” He has referred to Haiti, African nations, and El Salvador as “shithole countries,” accused Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats, and insulted Somali Americans by calling them “garbage.”
One of the first things Trump did after being sworn into office in 2025 was to sign executive orders aimed at eliminating DEI. His remarks about civil rights supposedly hurting white people are merely his latest salvo, along with his administration’s calls for white men to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“There is zero evidence — none — that the civil rights movement harmed white men in any way,“ said NAACP president Derrick Johnson in a statement to the Grio. “[Trump] is hoping we swallow his lie again, so that he can continue to privatize education, cut social services, and repeal civil rights laws and enforcement mechanisms. It’s all about making more money — even if we all suffer as a result.”
It’s sad — but not surprising — that in 2026 the president would reach for a play out of the tattered segregationist handbook to try and make white people the victims of civil rights.
Had he lived, King would have been thoroughly disgusted — but would have countered the president’s gutter-level deception with an elevated truth: “If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition that we now face surely will fail.”