Trump Says Civil Rights Caused White People to Be “Very Badly Treated”
President Trump thinks the Civil Rights Movement—a series of laws and events that brought the country closer to realizing the full humanity of Black people, LGBTQ people, and women—was “reverse discrimination.”
“Do you believe … that the civil rights protections that Americans had, starting in the 1960s and so forth, resulted ultimately in the discrimination against white men?” The New York Times’ David E. Sanger asked the president in an interview released on Sunday.
“Well, I think that 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 or a college. So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases,” Trump replied. “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.”
Arguing that increased equality somehow made white Americans worse off is rhetoric straight from the Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Nick Fuentes script. And the clumsiness of Trump’s explanation suggests that he’s just parroting their talking points rather than drawing his own conclusion on how exactly the Civil Rights Movement stopped white people from getting jobs and going to college. Either way, this argument is facetious and rooted in white supremacist ideology.
Trump then went on to brag about receiving the “Israel award” and claimed to not know Fuentes, despite having dinner with him and washed-up edgelord rapper Kanye West in 2016.
Read the full NYT interview here.
Donald Trump was glad to hear the news that one of his former advisers, Dina Powell McCormick, was named as Meta’s president and vice chair on Monday.
“Congratulations to DINA POWELL MCCORMICK, WHO HAS JUST BEEN NAMED THE NEW PRESIDENT OF META. A great choice by Mark Z!!” Trump posted on Truth Social, referring to Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. “She is a fantastic, and very talented, person, who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction. President DJT.”
McCormick, who served as deputy national security adviser in Trump’s first term, is now joining the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Last year, McCormick briefly joined Meta’s board of directors before leaving in December. McCormick is married to Senator David McCormick of Pennsylvania, who was elected as a Republican to the Senate last year.
“She’ll be involved in all of Meta’s work, with a particular focus on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s AI and infrastructure,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads Monday.
Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs used to have a frosty relationship with Trump, with Trump being banned from Facebook after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. But in Trump’s second term, Zuckerberg is on much better terms with the president, getting a front-row seat at Trump’s inauguration after donating $1 million to his inaugural fund.
Trump also threatened to raise tariffs against countries that levy taxes on digital services after Zuckerberg raised the issue at a White House meeting. For his part, Zuckerberg has changed the rules on Facebook to discourage fact-checking and ignore derogatory comments about immigrants, even taking down a popular Facebook page tracking ICE agents. Now it seems Trump will have another ally at the helm of Zuckerberg’s company.
CNN’s Jake Tapper torpedoed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s flimsy defense of the ICE agent who killed Renee Good.
During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Noem could only proffer a mealy-mouthed response after being bombarded by footage of rioters violently attacking law enforcement officers at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Donald Trump had claimed earlier Sunday that the use of deadly force was justified because Good was “disrespectful” of law enforcement.
“Would any of those officers have been justified in shooting and killing the people causing them physical harm?” Tapper pressed, referring to the January 6 footage.
“Every single situation is going to, um, rely on the situation those officers are on,” Noem replied. “That they know that when people are putting hands on them, when they are using weapons against them, when they are physically harming them, that they have the authority to arrest those individuals.”
Tapper pointed out that Trump had pardoned every single one of those rioters.
“And every single one of these investigations comes in the full context of the situation on the ground,” Noem said. “That’s one thing that President Trump has been so focused on. Is making sure that when we’re out there, we don’t pick and choose which situations are, and which laws are enforced, and which ones aren’t.”
The exasperated host then........© New Republic
