America in Chains

Back in 2018, in the middle of Donald Trump’s first presidency, I wrote a column for the New York Times titled, “We’re All in the Ghetto Now.” I was talking (mostly) metaphorically about how Trump’s clear disdain for so many of his fellow Americans — i.e., anyone outside the “Make America Great Again” flock — made him see much of the country as a “basket of deplorables” unworthy of political consideration (to borrow Hilary Clinton’s phrase, originally used to describe some of the more recalcitrant MAGA supporters). To Trump, this America — comprising Black people and other people of color — is a “shithole” country as unredeemable as any in Africa or the Caribbean, because Trump sees such demographics as inherently unredeemable. The silver lining, I argued, was that the newly expanded ranks of the oppressed and excluded could now join together, though there’s a catch: white people who opposed Trump — Democrats, progressives and many traditional Republicans — but have long accepted the benefits of white privilege would be forced to rethink those benefits and what it was really costing them. A major white-on-white reckoning about the future of our multicultural republic, which led to the Civil War 164 years ago, would need to happen again (minus, hopefully, another civil war.)

Yet the reckoning never came. Quite the opposite. As Trump doubled and tripled down on his segregationist view of the country, conscientious white people retreated rather than confronting the MAGA movement, hewing to the liberal edicts that talking about race only magnifies the problem, and that promoting cooperation with the other side while emphasizing commonality among all is often the best strategy — or will at least attract more voters. It didn’t. Three months into Trump 2.0, the ghetto is not only real, it’s moved way past being a ghetto. Trump, the entire GOP and their billionaire enablers have fused into an autocratic, hydra-headed monster that stands ready to crush any and all dissenters, from citizens to high court judges, out in the open and with no fear of consequences. It’s clear: We don’t have a government for and by the people; we have slaveowners. We are all on the plantation now.

Shocking, but hardly without precedent. Slaveowners are the country’s original fascists, who held sway for 250 years. They built the country’s social order. On plantations, they had absolute power over the fate of Black slaves — property — from whom they demanded absolute loyalty. Those who didn’t properly exhibit that loyalty could be punished, often violently, at any time and for any reason — or for no reason. Everything turned on the whim of the slaveowner, with retribution always in the air. This is the terror many of us are now living with, as we brace for the next executive order that whittles away more rights or tears more of the social safety net that Trump has deemed expendable. He wields the axe not to trim government waste or otherwise help people, but because he can. Cutting everything from diversity, equity and inclusion to climate research, with no warning or coherent explanation, constantly reminds us that we are living on his terms, the only terms that matter.

This new American plantation is similar to the old one in that Trump is obsessed with keeping Black people in their place, not just physically but ideologically; recent moves to remove artifacts from the majestic Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is just the latest way he’s doing that. Immigrants, who have been made into the new Negroes, are being shipped out of the country and off the plantation unannounced and unconstitutionally. (Though, of course, the Constitution never applied to slavery or plantations.) What’s novel is that white folks who oppose or resist Trump in 2025 have also become the new Negroes: those who openly criticize Trump, for example, risk having their characters impugned on social media or being called enemies of state security. Like a slavemaster, Trump whips (metaphorically, for the moment) not just individuals, but institutions like civil rights law firms, libraries, universities and foreign aid groups. Anything and everything that advances the notion of the “public good” poses a direct challenge to Trump’s absolute authority over all he surveys, and so must be quashed.

Much of this authoritarianism is about profit, of course, just as the business of slavery primarily was. Profit is another obsession of Trump and his billionaire allies like Elon Musk, who see the country as a fertile plantation they can exploit and leave fallow. Those living on the plantation ultimately don’t matter, especially Black and brown people in the ghetto-cum-plantation of big cities. In this country, profiteering and racial contempt have always gone hand in hand, with each facilitating the other. But the paradox is that the richer America grew, the more it became a beacon of “freedom” for poor and disenfranchised people around the globe, especially people of color. That paradox was an uneasy balance that was not destined to hold. Indeed, it has vanished for the moment, leaving only the naked truth about our country (hint: It’s not a shining city on a hill).

Even more than profit, treating America like a plantation is about control — specifically, control of our ethnic makeup. Trump’s relentless opposition to diversity is the slaveowner setting the limits on the number of people of color in his sphere, what role they play, what influence they can have. That’s what the decades-long affirmative action debate was all about: underneath the conservative legal and academic arguments about fairness and merit was an insistence that white people call the shots about who is in and who is out, about how much Blackness is enough at a college campus and how much is too much. Contrary to many Americans’ view of diversity as an ever-expanding good, for many white people, including many liberals, there was always an endpoint to diversity — a critical moment at which efforts to expand inclusion would overreach, causing such people to balk at and turn against the idea. This balking has unfolded in degrees, mostly through court rulings over the past several decades. But, in 2025, the deliberation feels like a thing of a past: the GOP, with Trump at the helm, has dropped the whole charade about diversity and reclaimed a contempt for color and full inclusion that it not only refuses to apologize for, but embraces as authentically American. It turns out that adopting the slavemaster mentality is really what it means to be great again.

None of this surprises Black people, or those who’ve more recently felt this contempt and control almost viscerally, such as trans people and women seeking abortions. The big surprise is how this is going to hit ordinary MAGA followers — those who aren’t supplicant politicians or billionaires (that is, plantation owners). The MAGA faithful, who’ve identified so closely with Trump’s biliousness all along and sided with him no matter what, will soon suffer the real consequences of Trump’s slavemaster mentality, as Trump and Musk unravel the country and an economy that these people depend on. It will soon dawn on them that the white solidarity they assumed in Trump’s declaration of “we,” which galvanized them the most and promised a new American golden age, is a lie — because most of what Trump says is a lie. They might finally realize that the race war is not between white and Black but between rich whites and working-class whites, and that MAGA supporters have been the foot soldiers of a holy war being waged against them, too. President Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, called out this bait-and-switch 60 years ago: “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.” It’s ironic, but entirely logical, that one of Trump’s first moves in his second presidency was to nullify Johnson’s 1965 executive order that banned hiring discrimination in federal contracting. Rules and limits about how to treat people of color have no place on a plantation.

Increasingly, activists and pundits say that the only way to overcome the aggressive resegregation being perpetrated by our own government is for people to band together and resist such efforts. This is what I said seven years ago: There must emerge a new “we” — the one embedded in the beacon-of-freedom ideal, one that has never existed and is thus yet to be realized. What must happen now, in other words, is nothing short of a revolution. Now means now: in 2025, as Trumpism moves ahead with warp speed, we simply don’t have the luxury of fighting another 250 years.