Bigoted beliefs, racist ties found among some of President Trump's appointees
As President Donald Trump has made clear in the first month of his second term, one of the major goals of his administration is to reinscribe the hierarchies of race and gender. The result would be to, once again, privilege those who are white and male in a country that has spent decades moving, if haphazardly, toward integration and equity.
In line with this agenda, Trump has appointed Cabinet members and staffers who have actively embraced conspiracy theories, bigotry and racism. These are people who could further dismantle the country’s hard-won civil rights infrastructure, deepening structural inequalities for Black Americans, Latinx people, women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities and others.
“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Darren Beattie, tapped for a Department of State role, posted on X the month before the 2024 presidential election. Beattie’s words, at least their focus on race and gender, could become a mantra for the administration, with Trump’s Cabinet nominees making it the least diverse Cabinet since the Reagan administration. That lack of diversity, however, extends beyond the Cabinet.
People in the Trump administration have appeared on podcasts hosted by antisemites, paid a Proud Boys member as a campaign consultant, spread the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory and shared the work of such white supremacists as Nick Fuentes. Extremist ideas have not been limited to low-level staffers. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for example, wrote in his 2020 book American Crusade that Islam “is not a religion of peace, and it never has been” and that Muslim countries are “no-go zones for practicing Christians and Jews.”
As an increasing number of intellectuals, academics and commentators have argued, this administration’s policies are not just racist, but also segregationist. The people running this administration are not simply overlooking these racist and bigoted views — they are actively embracing them.
Here are some of the people joining the administration who, as revealed through outside reporting and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, have expressed a variety of racist, misogynistic and bigoted ideas, or have ties to racist activists. Those listed have been tapped to work at all levels of the federal government — from running massive agencies to serving as staffers — demonstrating that the administration is giving real political power to people who actively embrace ideas that, in the recent past, would have been disqualifying for a government employee.
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/bigoted-beliefs-racist-ties-found-among-president-trumps-appointees/
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