Civil rights attorney Damon Hewitt on how Trump's DOJ created "an invitation to discrimination"

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Civil rights attorney Damon Hewitt on how Trump's DOJ created "an invitation to discrimination"
"You will have no rights that Trump and the federal government are bound to respect"

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published May 29, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Donald Trump is America’s first White president. He is advancing a revolutionary project to end multiracial pluralistic democracy. As a practical day-to-day matter, this means protecting the power, influence, and privileges of white people over Black people and other non-whites.

The evidence about the role that white racism and white racial resentment played in Donald Trump’s return to power is overwhelming: contrary to the disproved narrative, it was racism and not “working class” anxiety that overdetermined white support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

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Donald Trump’s authority and power are being used not just against non-whites but against white people — including his own MAGA people — as well. To that point, Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that is being forced through Congress by his supplicant MAGA Republicans will take away hundreds of billions (and likely trillions) of dollars from the country’s social safety net by cutting programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act and then transferring it to the plutocrats and kleptocrats. As President Johnson so wisely observed and warned, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

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Damon Hewitt is the President and Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Before joining the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Hewitt served as lead counsel on litigation and policy matters and supervised teams of lawyers and non-lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

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You summoned the type of therapeutic language that is necessary to understand that this American democracy and society are very sick and in pain. Using that framework and metaphor, if America in the Age of Trump is the patient and you are the doctor, how would you assess its health?

That is an amazing metaphor. Very powerful. As I see it, the patient has probably gone to an urgent care center when they actually need to see a specialist — or more likely multiple specialists. The patient needs to have an entire program of care, but they have been avoiding the doctor because they are afraid to do the work of taking care of themselves properly. They don't want to take the medicine or follow through on the treatments because it won't be easy. The patient does not want to change their diet. Getting better is going to require lots of hard work, and it is going to hurt. But guess what? If the patient stays sick, it is going to hurt even more. Denial is very powerful in America. There are large numbers of people and institutions who actually believe that they can just put their heads down and it will all be fine. It won't be. A big part of the denial is not realizing or admitting that you can continue to get sicker, that your health can devolve, the disease can and likely will get worse if left untreated. ............................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/05/29/it-is-like-gravity-being-reversed-how-doj-created-an-invitation-to-discrimination/