It’s not all that surprising that a man who began his presidential campaign saying Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers— who then went on to call for a Muslim ban, mock a disabled reporter, select a Vice President who supported gay conversion therapy, claim that bragging about sexual assault was just “locker room talk,” and refuse to decry David Duke— has been capital T Terrible for minorities. I know it shouldn’t shock me at this point, but the alarming depth and breadth of policies Donald Trump has supported that cripple marginalized communities in such a relatively short period of time still astound me.
Those policies are so deep-reaching and ubiquitous at this point, that they’re difficult to keep track of. But we have to stay on top of them in order to actively oppose them. With those hopes, here are 10 ways Trump has hurt minorities, including the blatant bombast and the insidious, lesser-known bigotry.
- Hate crimes have skyrocketed since the election, and yet Trump remains alarmingly quiet, rarely ever even issuing so much as a tweet in condemnation (in fact, after the latest mosque bombing, White House aide Sebastian Gorka defended Trump’s silence by suggesting the hate crime was a false flag attack).
- Trump’s policies endanger the LGBTQIA community: he favors banning trans individuals from military service, has withdrawn federal guidance to protect trans students from discrimination, wants to cut funding for researching the cure for HIV/AIDS, and has appointed numerous anti-LGBT activists (like Pence and Gorsuch) to positions of power.
- His calls to defund Planned Parenthood threaten women’s reproductive health rights, especially low-income women— which has only been compounded by his reinstatement of the global gag rule. And repealing the ACA jeopardizes health care for women, the poor, the elderly, and the sick.
- Trump’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric (such as his recent call to slash legal immigration) has had the chilling effect of silencing undocumented immigrants from reporting crime as well, fearing deportation. He also seeks to slash the U Visa program which historically protected undocumented women who report domestic violence, meaning women now have to decide between silently enduring the abuse or reporting it and potentially facing deportation. (In fact, a spate of immigrant women dropped the cases against their abusers since the election.)
- Trump has yet to give up on the Muslim Ban, no matter the many constitutional challenges and forced revisions. For now, he seems to have settled on massively slashing the number of refugees fleeing war-torn countries for sanctuary in the US and only allowing travelers from the original 6 banned countries in if they have a “bona fide” relationship in the US (to protect us from Libyan grandparents feeding us until our stomachs burst, of course).
- Rather than reforming the criminal justice system to more equally protect everyone (not that anyone really thought that was going to happen), the administration’s policies to bring back for-profit private prisons and seemingly bring back the War on Drugs doubles down on some of the most egregious injustices. And let’s not forget Trump’s apparent support for police brutality (which, apart from disproportionately targeting Black folks and men of color, also disproportionately affects the disabled).
- The administration’s support for cutting Pell Grants and tuition assistance programs would make it more difficult for, in particular, Black students and other students of color to access higher education.
- Trump really hit the ground running on voter suppression (consider his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and calls for voter purges), which tends to disproportionately affect people of color and the poor.
- Even his climate change-denying policies create a system of environmental racism, such as by dismantling programs protecting children from lead poisoning from paint, which Black children are five times more likely to get than white children.
- The mere fact that he’s surrounded himself with comically villainous, blatantly and despicably bigoted people like Sebastian Gorka, Steven Miller, and Steve Bannon should be enough to terrify us. Add to that the insidious bigotry of people like Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Jeff Sessions— people who can put a thick coating of polished veneer and sugar-coated diplomacy on their homophobia/xenophobia/racism to make the bitter pill supposedly easier to swallow— and the White House has created the perfect maelstrom to turn vicious hate into cold-blooded policy that will continue to cripple marginalized communities for generations to come.