The Racism in Trump’s Colorblind Conservatism

President Trump’s elimination of diversity programs in the US military is the latest offensive in the president’s war on so-called wokeism.  On January 27, 2025, the president signed an executive order that claimed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the military “undermine leadership, merit, and unit cohesion, thereby eroding lethality and force readiness.”  Removing DEI programs, Trump declared, will eliminate “race-based and sex-based discrimination within the Armed Forces of the United States.”  At the Department of Defense (DoD), Trump’s newly-installed Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, moved quickly to advance the president’s agenda.  In a two-page memorandum on January 29, Hegseth ordered the creation of a task force to abolish DEI.  “A foundational tenet of the DoD” the memo asserted, “must always be that the most qualified individuals are placed in positions of responsibility in accordance with merit-based, color-blind policies.” 

The Trump administration’s targeting of diversity programs in the Department of Defense is significant.  From the American Revolution to Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans of color have fought in America’s wars.  For African Americans, in particular, military service has played a defining role in the long struggle for racial equality, both bolstering demands for full citizenship and offering a pathway to upward social mobility.  From the thousands of recently emancipated slaves who joined the Union Army in the Civil War to the Double V Campaign’s reframing of the Second World War into a fight against both fascism abroad and Jim Crow segregation at home, generations of African Americans recognized military service as a tool to leverage the demand for first-class citizenship.  President Harry S. Truman’s decision to desegregate the Armed Forces in 1948—a full six years before the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education—underscored the importance of military service in the broader struggle for civil rights.  And by the mid-twentieth century, with Jim Crow in the South and de facto segregation in much of the rest of the United States, the U.S. military offered Americans of color unique opportunities for professional advancement.  As the Civil Rights Movement accelerated in the 1950s, there was thus some truth to Department of Defense officials’ claims that the military was a model of racial integration.  As historian Beth Bailey writes, a common refrain among DoD top brass was “the only color in the Army is olive drab.” 

The racial upheaval of the late 1960s, however, combined with the intensification of the U.S. war in Vietnam, led many African Americans to reject the idea that the United States was a beacon of democracy and the U.S. military a force for peace.  As boxing champion Muhammad Ali put it, “I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.”  Correspondingly, as new forms of racial pride and identity—exemplified by James Brown’s 1968 anthem “I’m Black and I’m Proud”—took hold at home, racial tension wracked the U.S. military, with African Americans increasingly demanding recognition. 

In response, DoD officials began experimenting with ways to acknowledge both equality in the ranks and differences among soldiers.  The transition from military conscription to an all-volunteer force (AVF) in the 1973 accelerated this process: in order to meet its annual quota of fresh recruits, the military needed to enhance its appeal for African Americans. 

At the same time, the power of the modern conservative movement surged in the 1970s, along with a free market ethos that marked the end of a liberal order rooted in the New Deal.  Casting racial discrimination in America as a thing of the past, conservatives rejected the politics of Affirmative Action by arguing that all Americans—regardless of characteristics such as race or sex—had the right to rationally pursue their self-interest in a competitive marketplace.  This “colorblind” conservatism underpinned president Ronald Reagan’s slashing of federal welfare programs, which, given the concentration of poverty in Black communities resulting from the long history of structural racism in the United States, disproportionately affected African Americans. 

As a result, in recent decades the US military has become even more important for young men (and increasingly, women) who perceive military service not as a way to bolster citizenship claims, but as simply the least worst option to make up for the public policy failures that bedevil American society: poor public education, overpriced universities, lack of affordable health care, and the Walmartization of employment opportunities.  Often referred to as a “poverty draft,” the US military has become the default option in a society that privileges warfare over welfare, and it’s no surprise that many of these soldiers are Black. 

Seen in this light, Trump’s anti-DEI initiative is part of a long history of colorblind conservatism, predicated on a refusal to acknowledge ongoing inequalities rooted in deep-seated structural racism and emphasizing equality of opportunity over equality of outcome.  It is also an assertion of racial supremacy: in Trump’s military, African Americans will still fight and die, but the default color won’t be olive drab.  It will be white.

Trump’s Casino Colonialism

President Trump’s proposal that the United States assume ownership of Gaza has elicited shock and outrage in equal measure.  “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump declared at a news conference on February 4.  Describing the seaside enclave as a “demolition site,” Trump suggested that the entire Palestinian population be permanently displaced and he promised to transform Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump’s declaration surprised even top White House officials, who spent the remainder of the week serving up reassuring messages that U.S. soldiers would not be deployed to Gaza and that U.S. taxpayers would not pay for the enclave’s reconstruction.  But the damage was done.  Abroad, Trump’s plan has threatened an already fragile ceasefire in Gaza; predictably, Hamas refused to countenance a mass expulsion of Gaza’s 2 million residents, while the governments of Egypt and Jordan quickly reiterated their opposition to absorbing Palestinian refugees.  Trump’s plan, noted one regional expert, “makes annexing Canada and buying Greenland seem much more practical in comparison.”

The focus among pundits and policymakers on the feasibility of the president’s Gaza scheme misses a deeper significance.  Trump’s declaration illuminated a worldview rooted in both America’s long history of settler colonialism and Trump’s own past as a real estate mogul.  The result is a uniquely toxic brew.  Let’s call it “casino colonialism.”  

In recent years, scholars have turned to the framework of settler colonialism to understand the logic of U.S. violence against Native Americans.  Unlike forms of colonialism in which the colonizers exploit the local population to enrich themselves, settler colonialism is predicated on removing indigenous people, taking the land, and repopulating it with settlers.  The expansion of the United States across the North American continent resulted in the dispossession of hundreds of Native American nations.  Between the 1830s and the 1850s alone, an estimated 88,000 Native Americans were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi with as many as 17,000 dying of deprivation, disease, and malnutrition.  This process generated a belief in “Manifest Destiny,” framing complex Native American societies as bands of animalistic savages and ennobling Anglo-American settlers as hardy pioneers with the God-given mission to civilize an unpopulated wilderness.  At the dawn of the twentieth century, surviving indigenous communities were sequestered on reservations, their movement restricted, cultural practices repressed, and economic opportunities stifled. 

The legacy of U.S. settler colonialism is evident in Donald Trump’s depiction of Gaza as an uninhabitable wasteland.  “I mean, they’re there because they have no alternative,” he told reporters, referring to the Palestinians. “What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now.”  In this framing, not only is Israel’s role in causing the destruction of Gaza rendered invisible, so too is the Made in America stamp on much of the Israeli arsenal; a recent report estimates that U.S. spent over $17.9 billion on aid for Israeli military operations in the 12-months following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terror attack.  Echoing the depictions of Native Americans by the advocates of Manifest Destiny, Trump’s initiative assumes that the Palestinians in Gaza are essentially rootless, and, like the champions of Native American removal, Trump dreams of seizing Gaza and relocating its inhabitants to some distant locale.  “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure,” Trump said.  “I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza.”

On another level, Trump’s vision for Gaza reflects his own history of shady real estate deals and financial speculation.  With its Mediterranean shoreline, the Las Vegas-sized Gaza Strip presents Trump and his close associates with mouthwatering opportunities for tourist development.  As Trump’s son-in-law, Jerod Kushner, asserted in a March 2024 interview, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods.”  The beneficiaries of that wealth, however, would most likely not be Palestinians, who Kushner suggested could be moved to the Negev desert.  On Tuesday, Trump echoed Kushner, declaring that “everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”  As White House officials struggled to walk-back the president’s scheme, David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, enthused about Gaza’s “25 miles of sunset-facing beachfront.”

Trump’s dystopian vision of a Gaza without Palestinians thus echoes the logic of elimination that underpinned U.S. settler colonialism.  Unlike the champions of Manifest Destiny, however, the imagined settlers of Trump’s casino colonialism are not wagon trains of hardy pioneers but Wall Street investment firms and billionaire capitalists.  It’s a scenario that Trump knows first-hand.  In the 1990s, Trump’s casino empire in Atlantic City failed miserably, yet he managed to amass enormous personal wealth and leave shareholders holding the debts.  Now as president, Trump has more money to play with and far less accountability.  But for the residents of Gaza, the stakes couldn’t be higher.