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Trump and MAGA's War on Civil Rights: We spent 60 years building it... here's everything THEY'VE rolled back
This article details the damage done by Trump, his accomplices, and their racist, bigoted, mean-spirited maladministration against the rights of MANY, in what amounts to an all out, overall ASSAULT that, the author notes, garnered only a SHRUG from much of the country.
Excerpts from the article follow below, along with a summary of their actions, referenced therein. Though unfortunately, it doesn't cover HALF of it.
They spent 60 years building it... here’s everything that’s being rolled back right now - Baller Alert via MSN
The Supreme Court handed down a ruling today that should stop everybody in their tracks. In a 6 to 3 decision, the conservative majority gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the heart of the law that gave Black people in this country the actual ability to elect representation that looks like us, that fights for us, that knows us. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion. The three liberal justices dissented. NAACP President Derrick Johnson called it a “devastating blow.” Harvard Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who filed a brief defending the Act, put it plainer than that. He said Section 2 is “still there, in theory, but no one will be able to win a claim under the provision.” Translation. States can dismantle Black majority districts whenever they feel like it as long as they say it was for political reasons instead of racial ones, and good luck proving the difference in court.
The Trump administration backed the challenge. That detail matters because it’s the through line of everything that has happened since January 20, 2025. Donald Trump didn’t just walk into the White House for a second term. He walked in with a checklist, and that checklist was Project 2025, and the entire mission was to roll back six decades of civil rights progress that Black people, women, and every other marginalized community fought, bled, marched, and died to secure. Fifteen months in, he’s running through the list, and it’s time we look at it honestly.
What ties all of this together is the speed and the coordination. This isn’t drift. This isn’t bureaucratic indifference. This is a deliberate, coordinated dismantling of the legal and institutional architecture that protected our right to vote, our right to bodily autonomy, our right to equal treatment under the law, our right to be safe in our own neighborhoods, and our right to economic opportunity. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Executive Order 11246 of 1965. Title IX of 1972. Roe v. Wade in 1973. The accountability frameworks built after Ferguson, after Floyd, after Taylor. Every one of those wins represents people who marched, organized, sat in jail, lost jobs, were beaten, and in too many cases were killed. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten almost to death for trying to register Black people to vote. Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma is named after a Klansman, and people walked across it anyway, knowing what was waiting on the other side. That’s the cost of what just got erased.
And the response from a lot of the country has been a shrug. Because the rollback has been steady, because each individual move can be defended in some technocratic way, because the administration has been smart enough to package some of it as “merit,” some as “religious liberty,” some as “election integrity.” But you string the moves together and the picture is not subtle. The same administration that gutted federal contracting protections also gutted the Voting Rights Act through the courts, also pardoned clinic attackers, also killed police accountability, also slashed Medicaid for the people who need it most, and also handed the wealthiest Americans a $12,000 a year tax win. Those things are not separate stories. They are one story.
The Trump administration backed the challenge. That detail matters because it’s the through line of everything that has happened since January 20, 2025. Donald Trump didn’t just walk into the White House for a second term. He walked in with a checklist, and that checklist was Project 2025, and the entire mission was to roll back six decades of civil rights progress that Black people, women, and every other marginalized community fought, bled, marched, and died to secure. Fifteen months in, he’s running through the list, and it’s time we look at it honestly.
What ties all of this together is the speed and the coordination. This isn’t drift. This isn’t bureaucratic indifference. This is a deliberate, coordinated dismantling of the legal and institutional architecture that protected our right to vote, our right to bodily autonomy, our right to equal treatment under the law, our right to be safe in our own neighborhoods, and our right to economic opportunity. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Executive Order 11246 of 1965. Title IX of 1972. Roe v. Wade in 1973. The accountability frameworks built after Ferguson, after Floyd, after Taylor. Every one of those wins represents people who marched, organized, sat in jail, lost jobs, were beaten, and in too many cases were killed. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten almost to death for trying to register Black people to vote. Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma is named after a Klansman, and people walked across it anyway, knowing what was waiting on the other side. That’s the cost of what just got erased.
And the response from a lot of the country has been a shrug. Because the rollback has been steady, because each individual move can be defended in some technocratic way, because the administration has been smart enough to package some of it as “merit,” some as “religious liberty,” some as “election integrity.” But you string the moves together and the picture is not subtle. The same administration that gutted federal contracting protections also gutted the Voting Rights Act through the courts, also pardoned clinic attackers, also killed police accountability, also slashed Medicaid for the people who need it most, and also handed the wealthiest Americans a $12,000 a year tax win. Those things are not separate stories. They are one story.
WHAT THEY DID:
Trump Executive Order 14173, revokes Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, requiring federal contractors to engage in non-discriminatory hiring practices.
Department of Labor issues directives to cease “promoting diversity,” to stop requiring affirmative action, and to stop “allowing or encouraging” workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, or national origin.
Every federal agency ordered to eliminate environmental justice and DEI offices and positions. Decades of policy infrastructure dismantled in 60 days.
DOJ reassigns senior civil rights officials who had been overseeing the government’s litigating positions on transgender rights, affirmative action, police misconduct, and other anti-discrimination issues.
The SAVE America Act, requiring every American to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register or re-register to vote,
eliminates online and mail-in voter registration, forces voters to appear in person to update any information including a name change or address,
and mandate that states share voter data with the Department of Homeland Security.
Similar laws in Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah, and South Dakota have already been signed. People whose birth certificates don’t exist will be locked out.
Trump rescinds Biden executive orders that directed agencies to protect emergency abortion care, defend patient privacy on reproductive health data, and expand information about contraception.
Trump pardons 23 anti-abortion extremists who had been convicted under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE),
the law that makes it a federal crime to use force, threats, or physical obstruction against people providing or seeking reproductive health care.
Department of Justice announces it would no longer enforce the FACE Act.
Pete Hegseth rescinds the policy allowing servicewomen and military dependents to travel and take time off to access abortion care.
Rescinded Biden era rule that allowed VA facilities to provide abortion care for veterans in cases of rape, incest, or threats to the patient’s life.
Trump removes ReproductiveRights.gov, the federal website created to give people accurate information about post Dobbs care.
The CDC pauses the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, the data collection program that has been used for years to track maternal and infant health outcomes
The Department of Health and Human Services, gutted by abrupt terminations that shuttered programs, including programs critical for maternal and reproductive health.
Trump reinstates and expands the Global Gag Rule, the policy that bars nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. health funding from providing or even mentioning abortion.
Trump freezes nearly all foreign assistance through executive order. Within ten days of the freeze, more than 1.3 million women and girls worldwide are denied reproductive care.
The World Health Organization (which the U.S. is also withdrawing from) says the cuts have made global maternal mortality goals “almost unachievable.
Trump revokes the Biden executive order on Advancing Effective and Accountable Policing.
Trump’s DOJ deletes the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, the federal tracking system created to prevent law enforcement officers with histories of misconduct from being rehired by other agencies.
In May 2025, his DOJ filed motions to dismiss consent decrees.
Trump signs new executive order directing federal resources toward more “aggressive policing tactics,” further militarizing local law enforcement, and providing greater protections for officers accused of misconduct.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress slashes Medicaid and SNAP. The CBO estimates the law will reduce resources for the poorest Americans by about $1,600 per year while delivering the wealthiest a gain of $12,000.
The same legislation provided hundreds of millions of dollars in additional resources to ICE for mass deportation.
Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status partially vacated in February 2025, leaving hundreds of thousands of people facing deportation by August.
The Department of Education set upon what Trump’s administration calls a “path to elimination.”
Elimination of DEI in higher education, opening of Title VI investigations into universities.
Withholding of billions in research funding, and gutting the financial aid pipeline (including Medicaid and SNAP) that most Black HBCU students rely upon.
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