March 17, 2026
By Jacob Collins Dodd
Staff Writer
When Donald Trump first ran for president in the 2016 election, his most recognizable slogan was “Make America Great Again,” better known as MAGA. He adopted this slogan during the presidency of Barack Obama — the first African American to hold the position — based on the belief that the United States was once a great country but had lost that status due to foreign influences, such as immigration and multiculturalism.
The sensible question many people asked in response was: “What needs to be made great?” The answer quickly arrived.
Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015 by claiming that Mexico was sending “very bad people” to the United States, calling them “rapists” and “drug dealers.” At a rally that year, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
ILLUSTRATION BY MARIAH ALLEN
Soon enough, he was praised by prominent white supremacist David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a far-right hate group. When asked in a 2016 CNN interview whether he would “unequivocally condemn” Duke, he said he would need more information to do so. During Trump’s second term, the MAGA movement has intensified. Political fights that could address health care access, housing costs, public services and wages — all of which have remained unchanged or have deteriorated since Trump returned to office last year — have instead been overshadowed by exaggerated and often unsubstantiated arguments about race. MAGA, as a movement, routinely frames minorities for political instability.
On Sept. 10, 2024, during Trump’s presidential debate against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, he said that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats.” These claims were fact-checked and proven false by local officials, state officials and news outlets, including the Associated Press and NBC News, in yet another move to attach disgust and suspicion to an immigrant community.
Two months after taking office for his second presidential term, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” ordering the removal of materials that focus on “divisive, race-centered ideology” from the federally funded Smithsonian Institution.
As a result of the order, on Jan. 22, the National Park Service removed multiple panels that detailed the Transatlantic slave trade from the President’s House, which is part of Philadelphia’s Independence National Historic Park.
Less than a month later, U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe ordered the Trump administration to restore the exhibit, making the point that allowing officials to rewrite historical interpretation poses a threat to publicly held truths.
By erasing the stories of racial minorities from the country’s most esteemed landmarks and institutions, the Trump administration is actively erasing nonwhite history in the United States. Whitewashing American history and removing culturally rich stories about historically oppressed populations robs Americans of an accurate and complete education.
On Feb. 5, Trump posted a 60-second video on his social media platform, Truth Social, that promoted a baseless lie insinuating a widespread cabal of Democrats tampered with voting machines to hand Democratic candidate Joe Biden the 2020 election. The final seconds of the video depicted Obama and his wife, Michelle, superimposed onto the faces of dancing monkeys in a jungle. The next day, the video was deleted.
The final seconds of the video depicted Obama and his wife, Michelle, superimposed onto the faces of dancing monkeys in a jungle. The next day, the video was deleted.
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about the post, which reinforces racist stereotypes, she said it was a “meme video” that depicted prominent Democrats as various characters from Disney’s “The Lion King.”
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt added.
When questioned about the post, Trump refused to apologize, telling journalists that he “didn’t make a mistake.”
Since its rise over a decade ago, MAGA has existed to counteract policies that encourage diversity. It operates through exclusion and systematic, policy-based oppression.
It is a political movement that has propagandized false accusations against racial minorities and directed political power toward institutions that stigmatize minorities. MAGA’s racism is not subtext — it is the movement’s main political ideology.
