The Daily - How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

During his second term, President Trump has upended 60 years of civil rights, largely under the guise of attacking diversity, equity and inclusion.Nikole Hannah-Jones, who covers racial injustice and civil rights for The New York Times Magazine, discusses the end of an era, and the growing fears of what a post-civil rights government will mean for Black Americans.Guest: Nikole Hannah-Jones, a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights.Background reading: How Mr. Trump upended 60 years of civil rights in two months.The “colorblind” campaign to undo civil rights progress.Photo: Doug Mills/The New York TimesFor more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow. This is the daily. Of all the seismic changes that President Trump has made in his second term, perhaps the most overlooked and consequential, is the speed with which he has upended 60 years of civil rights, much of it under the guise of attacking DE. Today, Nicole Hannah-Jones, on the end of an era, and the growing fear of what a post-civil rights government will mean for black Americans. It's Tuesday, October 21st.

Nicole, before we get started, I want to re-establish your background for listeners who maybe haven't heard you on the show in a little bit. you are, I would argue, the preeminent authority on the subject of race and civil rights in this country, not just, I would say, at the New York Times, but in American journalism. You're the creator of the 1619 project for which you won a Pulitzer Prize in commentary. And so when we learned that you were looking into the Trump administration's big moves around DEI, that's their description of this, we were very eager to have this conversation with you. so thank you for making time for us. Well, maybe I would quibble with the preeminent expert,

but thank you for having me on. And here, I want to begin with an admission on our part. We had been trying to wrap our arms around these decisions that the Trump administration was making when it comes to DEI for quite some time. Because I think it's fair to say it was easy to see the big moves they were making and how wide-ranging this effort was

to root out anything, even mentioning the words, diversity, equity, and inclusion. But it was harder to understand what all of it was driving at, what this larger framework was that this fit into. But that's exactly as it happens what you were trying to do. So where did your reporting begin?

So my reporting began really immediately looking at the executive orders that Trump rolled out on his first, second, third day of office. And seeing that, you know, despite him saying he was running on an economic campaign and securing his victory on the idea of economic anxiety, that his very early policies were racial policies. On his first day back in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federal agencies. The president calls DEI programs illegal, immoral, and discriminatory. This is a big deal, merit.

Our country is going to be based on merit again. Can you believe it? They were targeting what he was broadly describing as DEI. And one of the very first things Trump did. President Trump provoked an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. which stipulates that employers can't discriminate against job applicants or workers on the basis of race, gender, and other protection. On his second day in office, he rescinded an executive order that Lyndon B. Johnson had issued as part of the civil rights movement in order to try to enforce against employment discrimination. And so what Trump does is he repeals that order, but he repeals that order by calling it illegal DEI.

And my antenna immediately went to. up. Why? Well, because it's clearly not DEI. D.E.I is something different. And presumably didn't even exist back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president. Exactly. And so I was really startled that one of his very first acts was to rescind this executive order that's trying to enforce civil rights law, but also that he was labeling it, DEI and labeling DEI illegal. So once your antennae are up and your sense is that the president's campaign to go after DEI is something else, what do you do? What do you see? Well, this was day two. You know, I'm a magazine writer. And so, you know, I don't cover breaking news. I kind of... You take your time in the best possible way. Right. I try to sit back and really see what's the larger story that is unfolding here. So I'm just watching everything. And a lot is happening in this.

those early days. As of five this afternoon, every federal DEI office in the country got shuttered. DEI employees woke up this morning and found out their emails are suspended and they've been put on leave. NBC News has learned that the defense intelligence agency has ordered a pause on all events related to MLK Day or Black History Month. June teen, Pride Month, Women's History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, all paused. You were seeing kind of the purging of that federal websites that we're talking about black firsts or women's birth. The National Park Service has removed a reference to abolitionist Harriet Tubman from its webpage that's dedicated to the Underground Railroad.

Military websites also taking down tribute to the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the fabled Navajo co-talkers of World War II, and Ira Hayes, a Native American and one of the Marines who raised the flag at evening. There was a lot of erasure that was happening in a lot of different ways in this Blitzkrieg of targeting of all sorts of efforts to really catalog the history of this multicultural country. So I'm talking with my editor and she's really wanting me to do a story that is cataloging that erasure.

And I thought that was important. And yet at the same time, I'm also looking at what's happening across all of these different federal agencies. And I'm like, there's something much, much bigger that's happening here that is more than erasure that's actually about basic civil rights. Hmm. Well, just to explain that, what exactly did you see happening across federal agencies? So the first sign, like I mentioned before, was the rescinding of this civil rights era order against employment discrimination. Mm-hmm.

And then it quickly got deeper than that. So the Trump administration said they were going to slash 90% of the staff for this civil rights enforcement arm of the Department of Labor. The Trump administration was also gutting the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Education, threatening to lay off all of these civil rights lawyers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, going agency by agency and making it impossible to enforce. or civil rights. So, for instance, Lee Zeldin, who's the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, he announces that the agency is eliminating all 10 of its regional environmental justice and civil rights offices. And I'm noticing how in these orders and these actions, Trump is conflating DEI with civil rights. He's treating these two as the same thing. And so it becomes pretty clear that he is using DEI to attack civil rights.

Well, let's just define these terms. In your mind, the president is using the concept of DEI to pause, reverse, in some cases, it sounds like perhaps even eviscerate civil rights. But quite simply, what exactly is the difference? Because clearly, there's a strong relationship between the two. Civil rights are laws and legal protections, mostly passed in the 9th, 1960s as part of the civil rights movement that exists to ensure basic and essential rights. So these laws protect our freedom of thought and speech and religion.

And typically in the United States, we think of civil rights as protecting minority groups from discrimination. So we're talking about actual rights. Diversity, equity, and inclusion as an ideology, it arises out of civil rights and the protections that civil rights ensure. But they aren't the same things. We don't really see what we today know as DEI until 2010 or so. And you don't see the proliferation of DEI across nearly every American institution until after 2020 with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning. What we typically think of today as DEI, I mean, it really doesn't have a single definition. So DEI could be that corporate training that you had to go through about privilege and how race works.

It could be a training about gender or it could be programs to try to make workspaces more inclusive of people of color or other marginalized groups. It could be really just about anything. And that's a little squishier, obviously, than civil rights. And look, I myself was a critic of DEI because I think. felt so much of it was performative that, you know, you had companies where you could look at their hiring track record. What percentage of black people do you employ in management? And yet they're putting out these statements and hiring DEI officers who would have no budget and no power and yet had this very public position. Some of it became virtue signaling. Yes. There was a lot of

that. And so, you know, a lot of people probably roll their eyes at DEI. That's where we are in this country. And so weren't really realizing that something much, much more essential and dangerous was happening. But I was seeing kind of agency by agency, this entire civil rights infrastructure that had been set up over decades being dismantled. And that was happening at a pace and a rate and a sophistication that we had not seen before. Well, Nicole, I just want to linger on that idea for a moment, how exactly could it be possible that what begins as a dismantling of DEI somehow becomes the dismantling of civil rights itself? Because so many of the civil rights in this country come from constitutional amendments come from laws like the Civil Rights

Act of 1964 that would seem to make them not at all easy to roll back or dismantle in the first place. So just explain that. Well, laws are not self-enforcing, right? This is why you have laws against murder and robbery, but you still have a police department that has to go out and force the law. And so that's the same thing with federal agencies. Most people I have found are actually surprised that every major federal agency actually has a civil rights enforcement division within that agency. And there's a reason for that. The federal government touches every aspect of American lives, and it is actually the greatest tool, therefore, of enforcing civil rights law because all types of private contractors engaged with the federal government, our public

benefits, all of these institutions. And so out of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we see this growth of civil rights offices within the various divisions to ensure that any community that the federal government was engaging with was going to have robust civil rights enforcement. So why does that matter so much at the federal level? We have to understand, you know, the reason we even needed federal civil rights laws was because in some states, the state was actively discriminating against black Americans. They had segregation laws and segregation mandates. And so on a state by state basis, black Americans often could not go to their government to get relief from discrimination, not their local government, not their state government. So the federal government

had to step in really historically, going all the way back to the end of slavery, to ensure that black Americans' rights were being enforced across the country. So the Social Security Department has a civil rights division, or at least it did. And that was because black Americans actually face discrimination in trying to obtain their social security benefits, the Veterans Administration, It's been shown that black Americans face discrimination in trying to access their veterans' benefits. So there's a civil rights division in that agency, or at least there was. And so the idea is that if you're going to your local Social Security office and saying, I'm here to get my check, and the local office said, no, I'm not giving you your Social Security check,

then that could be appealed to the Civil Rights Division of the Social Security Administration, who would then redress it. Right. And so this is true across all of these different. federal agencies. And we tend to think of, and of course I talk about civil rights, often through the frame of black Americans. But these rights protect all Americans. And so it's been very critical for women, for people who come from foreign countries, for people who come from a, you know, minority religion, for people who are disabled to be able to have their rights that exist on paper vindicated. And so to have those agencies either fully dismantled or crippled, it sends a

signal that there's going to be very little civil rights enforcement. Right. And from what you're saying, without the federal infrastructure of enforcing civil rights law, those civil rights laws in a certain sense cease to do what they're intended to do. Yes, absolutely. You know, I think we look back on that period of the civil rights movement in kind of gauzy ways. We forget what it took to actually get those rights in this country, that black Americans were fighting for 80 years to get those rights, that this was a bloody and deadly fight. There were political assassinations. There were lynchings that these rights had been violently suppressed.

And we tend to tell the story that once those rights were achieved, then all of that anger and hatred and belief that black Americans should stay in their place, that it just dissipated overnight with the signing of these laws. It didn't. That was ingrained in our society. And so almost immediately, after the passage of those civil rights laws of the 1960s, we see a backlash. We're soliciting opinions on the civil rights bill.

Would you like to give us yours? I hear it all. I don't like it, that's for sure. I don't like it. I like you just trying to put something on the ownership that we don't want. And I think this is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened. Almost immediately, we see a movement that says these laws are too onerous, that it's victimizing white Americans who have the federal government prying in their business.

Why can't the federal government leave us alone and give us our school? You started to see, for instance, restrictions on efforts to integrate. great schools. We want no trouble. We don't condemn these black people. They are human beings, too. We understand that, but we want our school. You see within a few years of the civil rights movement, a Supreme Court case challenging affirmative action programs in college. Today, there was talk of white and black, in particular the rights of the white person. This was not heard before. I, as a white person, I'm discriminated against because of, you know, reverse discrimination. And you see, you know, the Reagan administration bring these anti-white or what they would call reverse discrimination findings through the Department of Education.

And that just only gains momentum when George Bush took over. So this has long been a pattern. I mean, some folks wanted to overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There wasn't a political will to do that, but you could defang it. So we see over time the steady chipping away of the ability to use civil rights law to affirmatively remedy years of racial discrimination. And under Trump, you kind of see this 60-year vision meet its perfect moment. We'll be right back. So, Nicole, take us more deeply inside the Trump administration's dismantling of these civil rights enforcement.

mechanisms in federal agencies and how it starts to, we think, impact the ability of civil rights laws to actually do their intended job. So we can look at a place like the Department of Education, which despite what the Trump administration says, the Department of Education does not set curriculum. That's set at the local and state level. It doesn't hire teachers. More than anything else, the Department of Education exists as a civil rights enforcement. division. It really exists to enforce and ensure the rights of students. But what you've seen

under the Trump administration is they shuttered most of the regional divisions charged with enforcing those rights. So what does that mean? One of the major things that the Department of Education does is it enforce the rights of students who have disabilities. Students with disabilities are supposed to receive special services, but those services are often very expensive. And so sometimes school districts won't provide them. The Department of Education, Civil Rights Division, will ensure that students, if they have a complaint, if they're not receiving the services that they are entitled to, that those districts comply. And also, they enforce the law for English language learners who have a right to an appropriate education. They enforce equal access to sports under Title IX. And then they

also enforce against all of the racial disparities that Black and other students face really across every level of education. So when you see these efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, which is what the Trump administration has said, is he really wants to shudder the entire Department of Education, what they're really shuddering is the ability to enforce civil rights law across America's schools. And as you said earlier, when that federal enforcement goes away, then any complaint, any lawsuit, any objection really falls back to the local school district, which for a variety of reasons may not have much of an incentive to do anything. Exactly, because if your local and state government are the actors who are committing the discrimination, where do you go?

Now really the only avenue for redress that people would have would be to pay a private lawyer or to find a civil rights organization who might represent them. And so where we once had the full weight and power of the federal government, the federal government has gutted nearly all the offices that will enforce the law. Okay. Take us inside, if you could, another agency where we are seeing this dismantling of civil rights enforcement. There's probably nowhere where this gutting is more profoundly troubling than what's happening at the Department of Justice. So, of course, the Department of Justice is this nation's most foundational law enforcement agents. And in fact, the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice is considered kind of the crown jewel of civil rights enforcement in the country.

It was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 precisely to protect the voting rights of black citizens and to prosecute crimes that were being committed against civil rights workers. But now, under the Trump administration, if you look at what that civil rights division has actually done, it's moved to dismiss voting rights cases and civil rights cases involving police departments under the guise of enforcing Trump's anti-D-EI mandate. So, for instance, the Justice Department walked away from overseeing the Louisville Police Department. And that oversight had been initiated by the Biden administration following the killing of Breonna Taylor. The Justice Department instead is going to actually target organizations and institutions in this country for trying to integrate and comply with the affirmative action mandates of the civil rights law.

On what basis? Well, on the basis that these efforts are anti-white, that they are racially discriminatory against white Americans. So on top of dismantling much of the enforcement capacity across all these agencies, what you're pointing to is a change in who the administration is fighting for. who it sees as the victims of discrimination. Exactly. So you see this when, for instance, the Department of Justice moves to dismiss this landmark civil rights lawsuit

against this chemical company that was emitting so many pollutants into this poor black community in Louisiana's Cancer Alley that that community faced the highest cancer risk in the whole country. But the administration sought to dismiss that case because they said that it wasn't the black community that was being victimized, but that it was the company that was being discriminated against. And we're seeing again and again through their language and their actions, they are constantly focusing on what they consider to be anti-white discrimination. And I think it's important to say trying to actually redefine white people as the primary victims of racism and discrimination in the United States. That's not backed up by any of the data we know, even self-reported.

amongst white Americans. Well, if that's the case, is it possible that we don't end up in this situation, Nicole, if not for DEI? Would the Trump administration be able to do what it is now doing as quickly and as thoroughly as it's doing it,

if not for the birth of the expansion of the institutionalization of diversity, equity, and inclusion, this musher thing that I don't see you a, signing anywhere near as much importance to as the traditional civil rights law and infrastructure? I mean, you know, Michael, that's hard to say. I don't know that even without those DEI efforts, we wouldn't have arrived here

anyway because, of course, we have been on this trajectory for 60 years. But I certainly think that in terms of a propaganda tool, DEI and the co-opting of that term has been very useful. And I don't think that all of the organizations that kind of engaged in this performative DEI have done civil rights any favors. Because I do think, you know, Michael, on the polling shows that there was a weariness with DEI among some circles, that there was a sense that some DEI practices went too far. I don't actually think it's a justification. I don't think that some training you had to sit through that you didn't like or some person who put something on a website that you took offense to can justify kind of where we are. But I do think it dampened opposition to settled civil rights law and enforcement being undone.

I'm glad you used that word dampen, opposition, because that seems like something we should talk about. Trump's message is not just finding an audience with Republicans at the United States, it would seem. There's not very much pushback you could contend from Democrats either. And that would perhaps suggest that the problem, as you see it, is not viewed in a bipartisan way as a problem. I think that is true to a degree. Polling shows that the majority of Republicans see efforts to ameliorate racism as making life more difficult for white Americans, that they tend to see racism against black Americans as a major problem but of the past

and that now white Americans are suffering from racism more than any other group. But more surprising, I would imagine, is the fact that since the time of the 2024 election, polling on racial attitudes showed that the percentage of Democrats who believe that white Americans benefit a great deal from advantages in society that black Americans don't have has plummeted 15 percentage points in just two years. I don't know that we can blame that on DEI, but certainly there was some societal force

that was leading white Americans to say, okay, maybe this has gone too far. And I think that there is a significant constituency who doesn't really want to talk about race anymore, and that while they may not agree with other Trump policies, they don't actually disagree with these that much. I mean, let's just ask this plainly. Is, for all the reasons we're talking about,

the dismantling of the structures, as well as the polling and the public opinion that seems to not be all that opposed to it, does that amount to the modern era of civil rights for black Americans? specifically, now being over? Unfortunately, that's what it feels like, because I think that we are on the cusp of an America that no one, our age, Michael, has ever lived in before.

I mean, this is where I think history really matters. Explain that. This country has experienced another period where black Americans gained all of these rights. And those rights would remain on paper, but they would lose any ability to actually access them. And that period was called the nadir. It was named so by a historian by the name of Rayford Logan.

He named it the nadir because nadir means a low point. This was the period after Reconstruction. Reconstruction was really about ensuring, that people who had been enslaved will now be able to access full citizenship in this country. So we passed the 13th Amendment, which ends slavery, the 14th Amendment, which for the first time puts equal protection in the Constitution.

No matter your race, the law has to treat you the same. It's also what gives us birthright citizenship. And we get the 15th Amendment, which ensures that you cannot be denied the right to vote based on your race. This is a period of time. where the nation passes its first civil rights law, the 1866 Civil Rights Act,

and that's followed by the 1875 Civil Rights Act. It's this remarkable period because literally, just a few years out of slavery, you have black men who had been enslaved who are now serving in Congress. They're in the Senate. They're in the House of Representatives. We have an integrated university in South Carolina.

There's integrated public schools in Louisiana, and you see this broad expansion of black women. rights. And it probably seemed at that moment that progress was inevitable. But it wasn't. There was a tremendous backlash. You start to see efforts to make it harder for black Americans to vote. So that's where we get the grandfather clauses and the poll taxes and the literacy test. Pretty soon there are no black people left in Congress. Then you see things like southern states that had integrated transportation and integrated neighborhoods start to pass laws of segregation to tell black people where they could eat, where they could go to school, where they had to

sit on a train. And the Supreme Court upholds that. So we have this great expanse of rights and then just as quickly those rights one by one by one are removed. So we know that this country is capable of doing that. I mean, we are commonly taught. about the civil rights movement as this achievement, a time that we should be proud of, without really questioning why civil rights movement had to be fought in the 1960s in the first place. The civil rights movement was not an effort

for black Americans to attain their rights, but to reinstate them. To get those rights back that they had achieved a century earlier and that the Nadir had erased. And so, as I'm watching everything that's unfolding, I just couldn't help feeling like we may be at the cusp of a second nadir. You're beginning to do this, but I wonder if you can describe, if a second nadir comes to pass, what does it look like,

given the progress that has been made in this country over the last many decades? Almost by definition, correct me if I'm wrong, bottom of a second nadir looks tremendously different than the bottom of the first. I do think you're making an important point that, obviously, even with the first nadir, they didn't reinstate slavery. So all progress was not erased, but a significant amount of progress was erased. And I think when we look at the landscape that is being created, not only are companies losing an incentive to try to integrate, but they would actually be penalized if they do. So Trump has threatened to investigate law firms that have integration

programs where they're trying to diversify the profession. I think only 4% of lawyers at all law firms are black. Compared to the fact, we should probably say, that black Americans make up about 14% of the population. Exactly. So if you are going to actually say that you will investigate law firms if they're trying to integrate, that could lead to a scenario where there are almost no black lawyers. We look at medical schools. The America First law firm, which was founded by Stephen Miller, Trump's right-hand man, is sending letters and filing complaints against medical schools saying that they are discriminating because they have race-conscious admissions programs. If you look at the settlements that Trump is making with Columbia, for instance,

or the demands of a place like Harvard or Brown, they're also saying, we have to look at your books. We need to see the test scores and race of every person you admit, as well as all of the hiring information on everyone you hire. Well, if I am a university, I'm going to be very reticent to hire too many black people or admit too many black students because I may meet the wrath of the federal government that is going to say that I violated the civil rights law. So if you look at the fact that he's saying DEI is illegal and that companies that they believe are engaging in DEI are violating the law and could face criminal prosecution, you can very quickly imagine a world where it is exceedingly difficult for black Americans. And so I think about, you know,

reading Ida B. Wells' diary. Ida B. Wells, of course, the great journalist and civil rights activist who was born right at the period of emancipation. And she is witnessing having experienced all of these rights and this vast expansion of possibility for black Americans and then slowly watches as those rights are being taken away one by one by one. And if we look at that timeline, black Americans would not regain full access to the ballot for nearly a century. We wouldn't have another black senator for nearly a century. The University of South Carolina, which was the only integrated public university in the South at that time, wouldn't reintegrate for nearly another century.

So I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but what I'm saying is all of the ingredients to once again see a disappearing of black Americans from elite institutions, from prominent jobs and professions, and even from the halls of Congress, it is possible in this moment. I don't know if it will happen. but all the ingredients are there, and that is very frightening to me. Because, again, I and you, Michael, have never lived in that America.

But what we do know is that we can live in that America again. On the call, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. A new analysis shows just how much black officials have begun to disappear from the most senior ranks of the federal government in President Trump's second term. Of Trump's 98 Senate-confirmed appointments during the first 200 days of the second term, just 2% were black. By contrast, during the same period, black officials accounted for 21% of the Senate-confirmed nominees under President Biden. 13% under President Obama, and 8% under President George W. Bush. At the same time, black representation in Congress could soon decline as well.

During arguments last week, the Supreme Court appeared poised to roll back a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights law that allowed race to be used as a factor in drawing election maps. If that provision is rolled back, Republicans are expected to respond by eliminating most of the majority black house districts across the south. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. A federal appeals court has ruled that President Trump can proceed with his plan to deploy the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, over the objections of local and state officials who say it's both unnecessary and illegal. A lower court judge had previously blocked the deployment, finding that Trump's claims that Portland was experiencing violent civil unrest was overblown. But Monday's ruling put greater stock in Trump's claims, finding that protests in Portland represent a genuine threat to federal officials and to a federal building there. And, in a series of text messages obtained by Politico, President Trump's nominee to lead a federal agency used a racist slur to describe holidays that honor black Americans, declared that people

from China and India cannot be trusted and confessed to having what he called a, quote, Nazi streak in me from time to time. The nominee, Paul Ngrossia, is Trump's choice to run the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates federal whistleblower complaints and claims of discrimination. But by Monday night, several Republican senators expressed doubts about and Gracious nomination, including Senate Majority Leader, John Thune. Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Stella Tan, and Lindsay Garrison, with help from Osta Chatharvedi. It was edited by Patricia Willens and Michael Benoit, Fact Check by Susan Lee, contains music by

Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.