I write to correct a fundamental error in my understanding of American history. For years, I (a Phoenix car accident lawyer) have described Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, as an aberration, as something unprecedented in our nation’s story. I was wrong. Trump is not destroying American democracy — he is revealing what American democracy has always been: a system designed to work for some at the expense of others. He is not America’s first fascist president; he is America’s first president to make fascism explicit for everyone.
The truth is more chilling than I initially understood. America has been operating as a fascist state for Black people since our arrival on these shores. What Trump represents is not the beginning of American fascism, but its expansion beyond the boundaries of race to encompass class, immigration status, and political dissent. He is not breaking the system; he is using it exactly as it was designed, just applying it more broadly.
The Blueprint Has Always Existed: Terry v. Ohio and the Architecture of Control
Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling allowing law enforcement to detain people based on their race, location, employment, clothing, and accent feels shocking to white America. But for Black Americans, this was simply Tuesday. We have been living under these conditions since 1968, when the Court decided Terry v. Ohio. That decision gave police officers the power to stop and frisk individuals based on “reasonable suspicion” — a standard so subjective it has become a license for racial profiling.
The data is devastating and undeniable. In New York City alone, from 2003 to 2024, 90 percent of people stopped by police were people of color. Black New Yorkers were stopped at nearly eight times the rate of white people, and Latino New Yorkers at four times the rate. In 2012, when stop-and-frisk reached its peak, NYPD officers stopped people 685,724 times — with 87 percent of those stops targeting Black or Latino individuals.
But here’s what makes this particularly obscene: despite being stopped and frisked at astronomical rates, Black and Latino people were no more likely to be found with contraband than white people. In fact, many studies show they were less likely to possess anything illegal. The police were not fighting crime; they were terrorizing communities of color. The system worked exactly as designed.
Now that similar tactics are being applied to undocumented immigrants, to political protesters, to anyone deemed “suspicious” by increasingly militarized police forces, suddenly there’s outrage. Suddenly there are calls for reform. Black people have been screaming about this for decades, and no one listened because it wasn’t happening to white people.
The Jail-to-Grave Pipeline: America’s Internal Concentration Camps
The parallels between Trump’s immigration detention centers and America’s pretrial detention system are not coincidental — they are the same machine with different inputs. Trump takes people who might be here without proper documentation and locks them away for indeterminate periods, letting them rot in brutal conditions while denying them basic rights. But Black Americans have endured this exact treatment for generations through cash bail and pretrial detention.
Consider the story of Kalief Browder, whose tragic life Jay-Z documented in the powerful series Time: The Kalief Browder Story. In 2010, at age 16, Browder was accused of stealing a backpack — a charge he denied. Because his family couldn’t afford the $10,000 bail, Browder spent three years on Rikers Island without ever being convicted of a crime. Of those three years, two were spent in solitary confinement. The case against him eventually fell apart, but the damage was done. Two years after his release, haunted by the trauma of his imprisonment, Browder took his own life at age 22.
Browder’s story is not unique — it is the norm. As of 2019, nearly 80 percent of people detained at Rikers Island had not yet been found guilty or innocent of the charges they faced. They sit in cages, presumed guilty until proven innocent, because they lack the money for bail. This is exactly what Trump is doing to immigrants — detaining people indefinitely based on accusations, denying them due process, and warehousing them in dehumanizing conditions.
The only difference is scale and visibility. When it happened to Black people, it was a “criminal justice issue.” When Trump applies the same tactics to immigrants, suddenly it becomes a “constitutional crisis.”
The Mathematics of Racial Suppression: Prison as Political Control
The numbers reveal the true purpose of America’s prison system: the systematic removal of Black political power. In Minnesota — supposedly a progressive state — Black people are incarcerated at rates 9.1 times higher than white people. Nationally, Black males receive sentences 13.4 percent longer than white males for the same crimes, and are 23.4 percent less likely to receive probationary sentences.
But these aren’t just statistics about crime and punishment — they’re statistics about voting rights and political representation. In all but two states — Maine and Vermont — people with felony convictions lose their right to vote. One in 13 Black adults cannot vote due to a felony conviction, compared to 1 in 56 non-Black adults. In states like Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee, over one in five Black adults is disenfranchised.
This is not accidental. This is not an unfortunate byproduct of tough-on-crime policies. This is a deliberate strategy to maintain white political control by removing Black voices from the democratic process. The War on Drugs, which Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman later admitted was designed to target “blacks and antiwar hippies,” has been the primary vehicle for this mass disenfranchisement.
Maine and Vermont — two of the whitest states in America — allow all citizens to vote, even while incarcerated. They can afford this “generosity” because their prison populations don’t threaten white political dominance. But in states with large Black populations, felony disenfranchisement serves as a modern poll tax, ensuring that those most impacted by systemic racism have no voice in changing it.
My brother, at 58 years old, was the first person in my family who has always been able to vote. During my parents’ lifetime, poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence prevented Black Americans from exercising this most basic democratic right. The methods have evolved, but the goal remains the same: the systematic exclusion of Black voices from American democracy.
The Great Land Theft: Economic Fascism in Plain Sight
Perhaps no story better illustrates America’s fascist treatment of Black people than the systematic theft of Black-owned farmland. In 1920, Black farmers owned nearly 19 million acres of farmland. Today, that number has fallen to less than 3 million acres. This represents a 98 percent dispossession — what The Atlantic correctly calls “a war waged by deed of title.”
The methods were fascialistic in their precision and brutality. County assessors deliberately inflated property appraisals on Black-owned land, driving up taxes until families were forced to sell. Government officials used eminent domain to seize Black farms for “public purposes” — sometimes for projects that never materialized. Black landowners were terrorized by lynch mobs, their property seized after they were murdered or driven away. Court records documenting Black land ownership were deliberately destroyed to conceal these crimes.
The total value of Black farmland lost since 1920 is estimated at $326 billion — wealth that should have been passed down through generations, creating economic stability and political power for Black communities. Instead, it was transferred to white hands through legal and extra-legal means that would make any fascist regime proud.
But here’s the beautiful irony: Trump’s trade war is now doing to white farmers what America did to Black farmers for decades. Soybean farmers, who depend heavily on Chinese markets, have seen their largest customer turn to Brazil for supplies. The president of the American Soybean Association, Caleb Ragland, warns that “U.S. soybean farmers cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute with our largest customer”. Farm bankruptcies rose 55 percent in 2024, with more increases expected.
These white farmers, many of whom voted for Trump based on racial and gender identity rather than economic interests, are now experiencing what Black farmers endured for generations: the loss of markets, the collapse of prices, the crushing weight of debt. The difference is that when it happened to Black farmers, it was celebrated as progress. When it happens to white farmers, it’s treated as a national tragedy.
Meanwhile, Black farmers — who were systematically excluded from the lucrative USAID contracts that white farmers enjoyed, and who had to “scratch out a living selling food, at lower prices, to Americans” — are less vulnerable to these new trade disruptions. Having been forced to develop more diverse, resilient farming systems, they are better positioned to weather the storm Trump has created for his own supporters.
The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse: Education as Systematic Destruction
Trump’s destruction of public education is following the same playbook America used to destroy Black schools during and after integration. For decades, predominantly Black schools have been systematically underfunded, understaffed, and under-resourced. These schools became laboratories for the kind of educational neglect that Trump is now applying nationwide.
Now, as Trump dismantles public education through voucher schemes and budget cuts, white schools are beginning to experience what Black and Latino schools have endured for generations. The suburban schools that once provided quality education for white children are starting to crumble, their resources redirected to private institutions accessible only to the wealthy.
The only escape for middle-class white families will be private schools — the same “choice” Black families have been told to embrace for decades while their neighborhood schools were systematically destroyed. But for most families, this choice is illusory. Private school tuition costs more than many families’ entire annual income, creating an educational caste system that perfectly serves fascist goals: an educated elite to manage the system and an undereducated mass to serve it.
Black and Brown students, already attending under-resourced schools, have less far to fall. Their communities learned long ago to create alternative forms of education and support. But white families, accustomed to functional public schools, are about to discover what educational apartheid really means.
Gerrymandering: The Democratization of Vote Theft
For generations, Black communities were carved up like holiday turkeys through racial gerrymandering. District lines were drawn specifically to dilute Black political power, ensuring that even in majority-Black cities, white politicians could maintain control. This was so systematic, so blatant, that it required federal intervention through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But now Trump and his allies have weaponized gerrymandering as a national strategy. Texas — long a laboratory for vote suppression — has exported its tactics nationwide. Congressional districts are being redrawn not just to suppress Black votes, but to maximize Republican control regardless of popular will. States that voted for Democratic candidates find themselves represented by Republican majorities through the magic of manipulated district lines.
This is exactly what Black communities have experienced for decades. The only difference is scale. What was once a regional strategy to control Black political power has become a national strategy to control American democracy itself.
The White Moderate: America’s Most Dangerous Enabler
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963, identified the greatest threat to Black freedom. It wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens’ Council — it was the white moderate. King wrote:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
King understood that “shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection”.
This analysis has never been more relevant. The white moderates of today — the suburban voters who tsk-tsk at Trump’s “rhetoric” while supporting policies that maintain white supremacy — are the same force that has enabled American fascism for centuries. They are the voters who support “tough on crime” policies that disproportionately target Black communities while expressing concern about “civility” in politics. They are the homeowners who support zoning laws that maintain residential segregation while claiming to support “diversity.” They are the Democrats who support means-tested programs that provide just enough relief to prevent revolution while maintaining structural inequality.
The white moderate’s commitment to “order” over justice, to process over outcome, to civility over equity, has always been the bedrock of American fascism. They provide the social respectability that allows systematic oppression to continue behind a veneer of democratic legitimacy.
The Luxury of Selective Outrage
Black people are not leading mass protests against Trump’s policies because we understand a fundamental truth that white America is just beginning to grasp: this system only changes when white people decide they want it to change.
We knocked on doors for Kamala Harris. We donated what little money we had. We showed up to vote at rates that defied every historical pattern, delivering margins that should have guaranteed victory. The only reason our numbers looked “disappointing” was because of Black people who are not descendants of enslaved Americans — recent immigrants who don’t carry the same historical understanding of what’s at stake.
But we also understand that our protests, our pleading, our perfect articulation of injustice means nothing if white people aren’t willing to disrupt their own comfort to create change. Black people can march until our feet bleed, and it won’t matter if white people go home to their Sunday dinners and Christmas gatherings and choose family harmony over justice.
This is why the most effective civil rights victories happened when Black suffering became visible to white audiences and threatened white economic interests. The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because it hit the city’s economy. The sit-ins worked because they disrupted business as usual. The Freedom Rides worked because they created chaos that white power structures couldn’t ignore.
But those tactics only worked because white people — eventually, reluctantly — decided that maintaining segregation was more costly than ending it.
The Path Forward: Disruption as Moral Obligation
For white Americans who claim to oppose Trump’s fascism, the question is simple: What are you willing to sacrifice to stop it?
Are you willing to skip Thanksgiving dinner with relatives who voted for fascism? Are you willing to explain to your children why Grandpa and Grandma can’t come to Christmas this year? Are you willing to refuse to socialize with, do business with, or maintain friendly relationships with people who actively support policies that destroy democracy?
Are you willing to create new communities with other displaced white people, Latinos, Asians, and immigrants who share your commitment to justice? Are you willing to prioritize political solidarity over family comfort? Are you willing to make the personal choices that demonstrate your values?
Most of you are not. Most of you will continue to treat politics as a hobby, something you discuss online but don’t allow to interfere with your real relationships. Most of you will continue to enable fascism through your refusal to impose social consequences on fascists.
We are entering a recession that will make speaking out even more frightening. You will be afraid of losing your job, your social connections, your economic security. But ask yourself: How much is democracy worth to you? What are you willing to lose to save it?
Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved people have already made our choice. We’ve done the work. We’ve paid the price. We’ve shown up. The ball is in your court.
The Historical Moment: Choosing Sides
All this chaos ends when white people choose to end it. Not when politicians decide. Not when institutions reform themselves. Not when the arc of the moral universe bends itself toward justice. It ends when enough white Americans decide that maintaining white supremacy costs more than abandoning it.
Trump is not an aberration — he is the logical conclusion of American racism. He is what happens when the systems designed to control Black people are applied to everyone else. He is the President America always was, just honest about it.
The choice before white America is the same choice it has faced throughout our history: Will you defend democracy for everyone, or will you maintain supremacy for yourselves?
Your answer will determine whether America finally lives up to its promises, or whether it completes its transformation into the fascist state it has always been for people like me.
I was wrong about Trump being the first fascist president. But I wasn’t wrong about what he represents: the moment when America’s true nature became impossible to deny.
The question is what you’re going to do about it.