Donald Trump did even more damage than we thought
When it comes to the Former Guy’s legacy, he will likely be remembered for the wave of xenophobia his administration rode in on and helped engender in the United States – leading to a number of unnecessary deaths among the most vulnerable people in the country – people guilty of no more than coming here for a better life. It’s not too hard to remember the scandal of kids in cages from just four years ago – and after the Trump regime was out of power, we got a wealth of more details on how the administration planned it to be as cruel as possible. Those details are still coming – suggesting that not only was the senior staff extremely bigoted, but they were using this cruelty towards an egregious end.
When Trump’s administration proposed bringing back the citizenship question on the 2020 census, it wasn’t treated with much scrutiny in the media – it was just seen as more of the same casual racism we’ve come to expect – if that. The fact is that aside from trying to use it as a way to round up people that Trump and co wanted out of the country who would avoid answering because they feared for their lives, the question had something more sinister in the works.
A congressional investigation found that by asking it and fighting a prolonged legal battle to make the question appear – the administration had a clear goal in mind: bend the Electoral College to their will by forcing congresional districts that were the most welcoming to undocumented immigrants to shrink in size and deplete their representation when it came to redrawing congressional maps in 2022. Fortunately, the sizable Republican advantage that they enjoyed a decade ago is largely gone and the question was struck from the 2020 census anyway. It’s a reminder that however bad things may seem now, the GOP had a plan to make them considerably worse – and it should be all the incentive we need to fight them at every turn.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making