Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey speaks at a press conference to address reports of a planned federal operation targeting Somali immigrants, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. REUTERS/Tim Evans
The Trump 2.0 administration is demonstrating the logical endpoint of a state project built on racial oppression. Trump’s actions show continuity with past history.
On January 7, 2026, Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), shot and killed a woman, Rennee Nicole Good, as they rampaged through Minneapolis, MN, looking to kidnap any undocumented immigrant, specifically Somali immigrants, they could find. The ICE agents are in Minneapolis to—according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem—“root out fraud, arrest perpetrators and remove criminal illegal aliens” from the U.S. The Trump administration began focusing on Minneapolis-St. Paul, home to the largest Somali community in the U.S., to investigate claims of alleged fraud by members of the Somali community. Previously, Trump had referred to Somali immigrants living in Minnesota as “garbage” and claimed that “they contribute nothing” to American society. Trump’s racist, vitriolic rhetoric against non-Anglo-European countries and people is not new. In 2018, Trump remarked that Haiti and other “African” nations are “shithole” countries when he first imagined widescale deportation policies. “Why do we need more Haitians, take them out?” he continued, “Because if you do, it will be obvious why.” We know Trump is a racist, and he doesn’t hide it.
There is little doubt that in the coming days following this horrific tragedy in Minneapolis that liberal pundits will rightly attack Trump and his sycophants for their predatory, violent, and racist anti-immigration policies. However, just five days before the shooting and after months of extrajudicial and illegal attacks on alleged drug traffickers in the international waters near Valenzuela, which killed over 100 people, the Trump administration launched an illegal invasion of Valenzuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolàs Maduro, under the pretense of a law enforcement action. This time, reactions from the Democratic Party regarding these blatantly illegal actions against a sovereign nation were more focused on the fact that Trump acted without their consent rather than the outrage that the administration broke international law and kidnapped the president of another nation. Indeed, the leader of the “opposition party,” Chuck Schumer, expressed dismay at being left out of the decision-making. And Congressman Gregory Meeks conveyed exasperation at not being included in the crime, noting, “We’re being treated like the Duma in Russia, where Vladimir Putin does not have to consult the Duma. He just does whatever the heck he wants to do.” Clearly, the Democrats want in on the party, too.
While Schumer and other Democrats jockey for their rights to the plunder of Valenzuela’s natural resources, responses to the violence, racism, and depraved nature of Trump 2.0’s recent actions within mainstream media and commentary from political pundits have largely situated themselves around the belief that Trump is either acting outside the “norms,” “breaking” the norms, “at odds” with traditional American politics, or that he is “transformative.” Yet these narratives overlook that Trump’s actions are not a radical departure but a continuation of the nation’s deep-rooted traditions of racialized control and imperial ambition. Rather than confronting this long history of racialized violence and dispossession that shaped our current society, these narratives deny or erase the fact that this country was built upon such foundations. Why is it that rather than face this ugly truth, many choose to deny this history as separate from the America they know? The answer lies in the uncomfortable truth: this is what the U.S. has always been, and Trump 2.0 merely exposes the history long obscured by the myth of American exceptionalism. In other words, to acknowledge that Trump is not an aberration but the norm in a racist capitalist U.S. society would undermine their self-belief that what they do and believe is exceptional in the world today; it will undercut their confidence that the U.S. and its leaders have always been on the side of right and justice; it will make them face reality that the U.S. and its position in the world is built upon racial violence, exploitation, and dispossession.
The Trump 2.0 administration is doing everything in its power to subvert the constitution and turn the country into a dictatorship, and it seems to be working with little resistance from existing so-called democratic and liberal institutions. In fact, in many ways, it feels like these same institutions are actively helping in this transition. Truly, the U.S. has a long history of racialized exclusion, violence, and incarceration both within its immigration policies and its domestic policies. From the legacies of settler colonialism, indigenous dispossession and incarceration, the enslavement of millions of Africans, the apartheid regimes in the southern states and racialized and violent policing in the northern and western states, to the rise of modern day mass incarceration, militarized policing, and American wars of empire and neocolonial exploitation, the United States has always had a fascist nature in its institutions at both the local and federal levels. Within this context, what the Trump administration is doing by kidnapping people of color and immigrants off the streets in broad daylight, censuring universities, strong-arming the press, whitewashing/erasing history, and kidnapping heads of state, is not new or unexpected.
As a settler colonial society, the U.S. is fundamentally built upon racialized exclusionary and violent policies. The dispossession of indigenous land, the genocidal wars of westward expansion, and the incarceration of indigenous peoples, along with attempts to erase their cultures alongside the centuries of Black enslavement, also a genocide, are examples of the fascist tendencies inherent in U.S. society. The inability of the U.S. to properly confront and remedy this history of enslavement and genocidal dispossession of land and lives has allowed the illiberal, nativist and white supremacist reactionaries to rise to the top of the political spectrum and use the state’s institutions to bend the nation’s carceral regimes to their will. Beyond its borders, the U.S. has historically justified its neocolonial expansion through racialized troupes and the myth of the non-Christian/white savage. In the late 1800s, while southern Redeemers in the U.S. were rewriting the history of slavery and the Civil War, Imperialists were justifying U.S. empire as part of the “white man’s burden” to bring civilization to the savages in places like Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and China. In other countries, such as Haiti, they simply extracted the wealth and labor from the people and left the civilizing to dictators and military strongmen. Within the logics of this racialized neocolonial expansion lie the rationales that the Trump 2.0 administration uses today to deport “criminals” and “gang members”: they are uncivilized.
In 1935, W. E. B. DuBois spoke against using history as an ideological tool. He argued that erasing the history of this country, no matter how despicable or violent, would corrupt our academic institutions and lead down the road towards authoritarianism. Today, we are seeing the effects of never truly reconciling a violent and racist history. The first year of the Trump 2.0 administration has shown that we are still contending with the nativist impulses and racialized exclusion and violence that are littered throughout U.S. history. Unless we are able to move beyond the myth of American exceptionalism, acknowledge the past as it truly was, and take concrete steps to reconcile that past, this country will never be the true democracy that it imagines and claims itself to be.
Willie Mack is an Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests focus on race, immigration, the Cold War, and the carceral state in twentieth-century United States.
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