President Donald Trump always provokes outrage on the regular occasions when he descends into overt public racism, as he did last week by reposting a video that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

But Trump’s bigger threat to race relations in America is coming through actions that attract much less attention — such as the federal investigation of Nike’s hiring practices revealed in court documents one day before he posted the video. Trump’s words matter, but it is primarily his deeds that threaten to unleash structural racial discord in the years ahead.

Throughout his political career, Trump has amplified racist language and images more overtly than any national political leader since segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace in the 1960s. (Even Wallace arguably used more carefully coded language.) Trump has declared that four non-white Democratic female representatives (all of whom were obviously U.S. citizens) should “go back” where they came from; described the Baltimore district of an African-American Democratic representative as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”; derided “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime” “shithole countries” sending non-white immigrants to the U.S.; accused Haitians in Ohio of eating dogs and cats and described Somali immigrants as “garbage.”

Probably no chief executive at any other major institution — business, academic or civic — could keep their job after one such outburst, much less so many of them. Is there a board of directors anywhere that would buy Trump’s half-hearted defense that a low-level staffer posted the Obama video?

Trump’s defenders often portray his behavior as a healthy corrective to a stifling political correctness, but there’s a big gulf between candor and bigotry. Trump at times uses words to scandalize; more often he wields them to dehumanize. Trump’s degrading language matters because when the person with the world’s largest megaphone spreads such malignant words and images it inevitably shapes the boundaries of what others in society consider acceptable. “He and his administration are giving license to bullies,” says Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a leading civil rights group.

Even more consequential than Trump’s inflammatory words, though, are his policies; he is most lastingly reshaping America’s racial future through the (usually) more measured language found in Federal Register notices, court filings and executive orders. Through those means, he is not so much disabling as inverting federal civil rights enforcement. Rather than seeking to unearth bias against racial minorities, the administration is, on the grounds of combating alleged discrimination against white people, systematically challenging the responses public and private institutions have devised to address racial inequities.

In its first months, the administration moved most aggressively against efforts to promote diversity in education. The Education Department has sent letters to colleges and universities and K–12 schools, as well as state and local education administrators, warning that the consideration of race in any aspect of their operations — from admissions to hiring to discipline or the granting of scholarships and prizes and even the classroom discussion of America’s racial history — could prompt the administration to terminate their federal funding.

Courts for now have blocked those efforts. But the administration continues to seek the same goals through other means. It has incorporated demands to eradicate all diversity programs into its investigations of top-tier universities such as Columbia, Harvard and UCLA. In late January, the administration joined a conservative group suing the UCLA School of Medicine, accusing the school of violating the 2023 Supreme Court decision almost entirely banning the use of race in college admissions (partly because of statements from senior officials simply affirming the value of a diverse student body).

These efforts signal to colleges and universities that any effort at inclusion risks a costly and unpredictable legal fight with the federal government. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s demand last week that that Nike “produce information related to allegations that the company discriminated against white workers” sends the same message to employers. The administration has similarly sought to expunge diversity goals in federal and state contracting — for instance, citing such efforts as the formal reason it has frozen funding for the Gateway tunnel project connecting New Jersey and New York City. (A court last week ordered the administration to temporarily restore the funding.)

The administration’s inversion of civil rights enforcement risks cementing a dangerous imbalance. Despite some progress, the top ranks of almost all American institutions remain deeply unrepresentative. Black and Hispanic students, for instance, now comprise nearly two-fifths of the total entering college class, but only about one-fifth of the first-year students at the roughly 500 most selective schools. Black and Latino employees likewise account for one-third of all workers, but only about one-sixth of the workers whose wages put them in the highest quintile of earners.

Preserving the most lucrative and influential leadership positions primarily for white people is a recipe for friction in a society that will increasingly rely on non-white students, workers, consumers and taxpayers. Kids of color already comprise a clear majority of the nation’s under-18 population. Not just the share, but also the number, of white kids has fallen from 44 million in 2000 to less than 35 million in 2024, probably an unprecedented decline over such an extended period, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the center-left think tank Brookings Metro.

“There is no turning back from that” growing diversity, Nelson says, no matter how hard Trump tries “to turn back the clock to a time before civil rights legal standards [that] people bled, fought, and died for.”

She’s right that Trump can’t stop America’s transition into a majority-minority nation, no matter how virulently he rages against its manifestations or imposes policies designed to preserve the racial hierarchy of earlier generations. But through his words and actions alike, Trump can ensure that the transition unfolds with maximum social tension. By reinforcing past inequities, he is dooming American society to future conflicts.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.

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