Trump chills America in a thousand ways — but this one ends with burning crosses

I’ve noticed lately how often the word chilling appears in coverage of Donald Trump and the fascist regime he commands. Not only are we being numbed by Trump, we are overusing words to describe his brutality.

It was chilling to see Renee Good gunned down by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Chilling to watch the administration misrepresent what happened. Chilling to see the video.

It was chilling to watch the Department of Justice turn on the Federal Reserve chair. Chilling to hear Trump announce he is effectively “running” Venezuela. Chilling to hear him threaten Greenland. Chilling to hear him talk, offhandedly, about military action against Iran.

That’s just this week. We could do this all day. That’s the problem.

We are being numbed to words and actions that, not long ago, would have been unthinkable from an American president. In that sense, there is a literal chill over the country, a palpable political cold front that refuses to move.

America is being consumed by a polar vortex of autocracy. And amid it all, something deeply chilling slipped past last week, with far less attention than it deserved.

Trump sat for a marathon interview with journalists from theNew York Times. Obsessed with coverage of his declining health, particularly from the Times, he was eager to project vitality, dominance, stamina. Buried in that rambling, self-indulgent session were remarks that, at any other moment in American history, would have triggered national indignation.

Trump spoke about civil rights. Or rather, he spoke about how white people are being treated badly by them.

According to Trump, white Americans are being “passed over,” “neglected,” and discriminated against — as though white people had endured centuries of enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, lynching, voter suppression, mass incarceration, and state-sanctioned exclusion. An American president, sitting in the Oval Office where landmark civil rights legislation was signed, openly inverted history to cast white injustice as the nation’s great moral crisis.

What was perhaps most chilling of all was how quickly the moment passed. Headlines moved on. Cable panels reacted for four minute segments. The press largely treated it as another Trumpian incitement. Another rant. We paused for a second then kept going, hit by the next domino in an endless line of provocations.

These words were not idle. They have already become marching orders for his administration.

Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security posted new recruitment materials for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Dark, militarized, heavy with symbolism, the images were quickly flagged by extremism researchers and civil rights advocates.

They bore a striking resemblance to propaganda long favored by white nationalist and far-right movements: stylized law-enforcement imagery, coded appeals to “invasion” and racial threat, aesthetics more common to authoritarian regimes.

DHS ultimately pulled the materials, but not before analysts warned that this reflected something deeper than a design misstep. It was a willingness to flirt with racist and extremist subcultures in order to staff the federal government. It was a glimpse of how racialized fear is no longer confined to Trump’s rhetoric, but embedded in government messaging.

Trump has crossed so many lines of decency, decorum, and democracy that even his most explicit trashing of civil rights barely registers. By diminishing the historic struggle of Black Americans and reframing equality as oppression, he is cementing a vision of white-only rule — in broad daylight.

This is not new. Trump’s record on race stretches back decades. In the 1970s, the federal government sued him and his father for housing discrimination in Queens, alleging they systematically denied rentals to Black tenants. In 1989 he took out a newspaper ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, young Black and Latino boys later exonerated in regards to a brutal rape. He refused to apologize, even after DNA proved their innocence.

He spent years promoting the racist lie that Barack Obama was not an American citizen. As president, he referred to predominantly Black and brown nations as “sh–hole countries” and told four non-white members of Congress to “go back” where they came from. He defended white nationalists in Charlottesville by insisting there were “very fine people” among them.

This is the man now lamenting the supposed plight of white Americans.

It’s tempting to dismiss Trump talking about civil rights the same way we dismiss him talking about affordability. As a privileged white man who inherited his wealth and has never had to navigate a job interview, a rental application, or a grocery aisle, he has zero credibility. His entire life has been insulated by money and power.

But focusing on his lack of credibility misses the real warning.

Surrounded by ideologues like Stephen Miller, Trump is not misunderstanding civil rights. He is dismantling them. He is openly dragging this country backward, toward an America where access, opportunity, and protection are rationed by race. He is rewriting the history of slavery and segregation. His administration has moved to gut DEI programs across the federal government, sending a signal corporate America has rushed to follow.

Trump has always said the quiet parts out loud. This time, the quiet part is apartheid.

We’ve been here before. How many times have we waved away his threats as hyperbole, only to watch them materialize? He promised a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., and signed one. He promised to weaponize the government against his enemies, and now the Justice Department is on a retribution tour. He promised to dismantle restraints on executive power, and those guardrails are virtually gone.

To treat his words now as exaggeration is to ignore the pattern giving us a cold slap in the face.

Trump told the Times only his own morality could stop him. He might as well have said mortality. But even that isn’t true. What will outlive Trump is the movement he has built, including a Republican Party reshaped into a whites-only club, stripped of pluralism, diversity, and dissent. He poured a bucket of white paint over Lincoln's party.

Back to those recruitment posts. The secret is out. The federal government is signaling that white nationalists need only apply. The old adage that government jobs are lifetime jobs means those hired during the next three years will not be temporary figures. They will be embedded in the machinery of the state, long after this moment passes.

Finally, Trump’s words echo into the far reaches of MAGA. He validates their bigoted attitudes and provides license for demeaning Black and brown people. Society becomes infected with interpersonal racism.

What begins as messaging becomes staffing. What becomes staffing becomes culture. And culture, once frozen in place, is extraordinarily hard to thaw.

This is how another era of racial discrimination takes hold, sinisterly, beneath a layer of cold. The erosion of DEI and civil rights didn’t begin with a blaze. It began with a flicker. This year, that flicker threatens to become a bonfire.

Or worse — a cross burning, igniting hate in a country that told itself, for far too long, that it was only feeling chills.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”