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Grasping the scale of President Donald Trump’s assault on American governance is no small matter. The administration is challenging laws, claiming the right to reinterpret the Constitution, questioning judges’ powers, and arrogating new powers to itself. Seeking to convey the gravity of the situation, many commentators have labeled what’s happening a “constitutional crisis.”

That’s a mistake—not because what’s happening is not serious, but because it is so serious. This week, the Trump administration came the closest it has thus far to outright refusing to follow a judge’s order, after days of comments from Vice President J. D. Vance, Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk, and others questioning whether a president must follow court rulings. That’s a threat to the very basic question of whether a president is subject to the law or not—especially when so many things that Trump has done appear plainly illegal.

But the abstraction of constitutional crisis obscures the immediate danger, making what’s happening seem like an issue more for legal experts and policy wonks than for the everyday Americans who stand to lose not only essential government services but also fundamental rights. “A president refusing to abide by the law or the Constitution and ignoring court orders to stop his illegitimate actions would be a constitutional crisis like a bank robbery is a cash flow crisis,” Joseph Ura, a political scientist at Clemson University, told me via email.

A recent New York Times article reported that many legal scholars believe that the country is in a constitutional crisis, but it began by acknowledging, “There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis.” The law, for all its careful parsing of language, has a weakness for this sort of I-know-it-when-I-see-it formulation, but if even the professors can’t define it, how can the general public? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor, warns that “we've got our toes right on the edge of a constitutional crisis,” which also raises interesting questions about the topography of a crisis.

At one time, appeals to the sanctity of the Constitution might have swayed more people, but one reason Trump has been able to dominate U.S. politics for so long is that voters are not feeling protective of their institutions. About six in 10 people in a 2022 New York Times poll said the constitutional order needs major reforms. In 2023, Pew found that just 4 percent of Americans think the political system is working very well. And in 2024, voters selected a guy who’d tried to overturn the previous election. Regardless of what law professors think, the populace has already decided that the Constitution is in crisis.

Perhaps I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I don’t think that means they want an unaccountable leader who is not beholden to laws, courts, or Congress. Already, Trump’s approval rating is down, and his disapproval rating is up. I noted last week that some of his supporters are regretting their choice. Many of the effects of sloppy cost cutting are going to be even more unpopular once voters feel them. But appeals to a system they’ve come to distrust are not the way to rally them.

A “constitutional crisis” certainly sounds bad, even if you can’t say what it is. But whatever fresh shock the term might have provided has been dulled by years of use. Google Trends tells a story of desensitization. Going back to 2004, there are sporadic spikes of interest in the term, such as during the 2008 financial crisis and around government shutdowns during the Barack Obama presidency. Then the line starts bouncing around like a flea when Trump takes office the first time. It calms again during the Biden administration but takes off on a dizzy, vertical ascent when Trump returns to office in 2025.

Commentators who labeled previous moments “constitutional crises” may not have been crying wolf, exactly, though in retrospect perhaps the term could have been reserved for the worst moments—January 6, for example—for maximum clarity. Regardless, you can’t hear about a problem on and off for years without it becoming less urgent. Trump isn’t just destroying norms; he’s established a state of crisis as the new norm.

And insofar as people do think of this as a “crisis,” that might only further empower Trump—who’s responsible for it in the first place. That’s because, in times of crisis, Americans usually look to the president to act quickly and decisively. That can be good in a bona fide external crisis, like an attack by a foreign country or a pandemic, but that’s not what’s happening now. “To the extent we’re in a crisis, it’s a crisis of too much executive energy,” Ura told me.

The better alternative is to describe exactly what’s happening: The president is taking actions he doesn’t have the power to take, disrespecting the rule of law, and attempting to revoke long-established rights. He is portraying himself as a king. Soon, he may openly defy an order from a duly appointed and confirmed federal judge. That would be a step closer to the end of American democracy than anything since January 6. Call that a catastrophe, call it lawlessness, call it a threat—just don’t call it a constitutional crisis.

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Today’s News

Federal Judge Dale E. Ho delayed a ruling on the Justice Department’s request to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and appointed an external lawyer to present arguments challenging the department’s request.

Caleb Vitello, ICE’S acting director, was reassigned to another role in the agency. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass removed Fire Chief Kristin Crowley for her handling of last month’s wildfires.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Haley Mlotek’s new memoir and history of divorce finds a fresh way to talk about the dissolution of a marriage, Boris Kachka writes. Atlantic Intelligence: “No matter DOGE’s goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns,” Matteo Wong writes.

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Bad poems never die, never really go away: The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, where their bad lines, loose and weedlike, drift and coil and tangle with one another eternally. Robert Frost, who turned 20 in 1894, uncertain of his gift, bouncing among stray gigs (actor’s manager, repairer of lights at a wool mill) in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had written a poem called “My Butterfly.” It begins like this: “Thine emulous fond flowers are dead too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft …” It is what it is, a bad poem. A random-feeling extrusion of lyrical matter, like something that might come out of the tube when you pull the lever marked Poetry.

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P.S.

Whatever term you use, our domestic drama has made it easy for many Americans to overlook just how angry our neighbors to the north are about Trump’s rhetoric around Canada, whether it’s tariff threats or talk of annexation. Last night, Canadians got a chance to strike back in the final of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off, and they took it, defeating the United States in overtime despite a pregame pep talk from Trump. To understand the stakes, I checked in with Nat Frum, an avid Canadian American hockey fan and the son of my colleague David Frum. “This was just a hockey game in a made-up, brand-new tournament created to replace an increasingly irrelevant all-star game—but it felt so much more than that,” Frum wrote in an email. “This felt like the only way Canada could fight back against these past two months of Trumpism and man, did it feel good to see that maple leaf raised on American soil.” It turns out American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to miracles on ice.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”  

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order. The legality of the order over K–12 curricula is unclear, but the chilling effects are real nonetheless.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

“This is really taking us back to a kind of pre-civil-rights-movement vision of America,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me in an interview last year, before Trump won the 2024 election. “A backlash is a pushback. This is really much more of a demolition effort.”

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true—we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

Other MAGA figureheads have promoted similar ideas. In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revoked “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.” Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Caldwell’s assessment has grown in popularity among prominent conservatives. The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has described the Civil Rights Act as having “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” and he has attacked Martin Luther King Jr., Wired reported, as part of a “broader strategy to discredit” King and “the Civil Rights Act.” On his social network, X, the South African–born Musk, who is playing a key role in the Trump administration, regularly promotes scientific racism, the pseudoscientific ideology that holds that race determines individual potential. Some of the staffers Musk has hired to dismantle the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws seem to share those ideological predilections. One DOGE staffer resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he maintained a pro-eugenics social media account where “he appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers.” He was reinstated after receiving public support from Trump and Vance.  The problem conservatives trying to undermine anti-discrimination law seem to have with an “official hierarchy of races” is not that one exists but that, in their warped conception, white people are not on top, as they should be.

This ideology is apparent in the rote blaming of diversity by some conservatives for every catastrophic event—as they did following a midair collision over the Potomac River. Or a freighter crashing into a bridge in Baltimore. Or doors flying off Boeing planes.The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.  

Even so, the Great Resegregation seeks not a return to the explicit racial separation of Jim Crow, but rather an embrace of ostensibly “color-blind” policies intended to sustain a de facto segregation that is more durable and less overt, one in which Black access to the middle and elite strata of American life will be ever more rare and fleeting. The numbers of Black doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, showrunners, and generals would no longer rise. And there would be no more Black presidents. The real but fragile advancement of the Black poor into the Black middle class would be stalled or reversed. Most Black people would be confined to, as Trump memorably put it, the menial “Black jobs” they were meant for, save for those willing to sustain the self-serving fiction that they are among the good ones.

The demolition of multiracial democracy began a dozen years ago, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rolled back voting-rights protections adopted in the 1960s to enforce the rights enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Those protections made America, for the first time, a democracy for all its citizens. They diversified Congress, and led to the election of the first Black president. The Roberts Court has steadily eroded those protections, insisting that they are no longer necessary, even as racist ideas once considered beyond the pale return to the mainstream. These changes have had the predictable outcome of increasing racial disparities in voting.

The Roberts Court has treated policies meant to rectify racial discrimination as themselves racist. The Court shut down what remained of public-school integration efforts. It overturned affirmative action in higher education. These decisions have eroded diversity in the classroom. But they’re just the beginning for the resegregators, who intend to ensure that America’s traditional racial hierarchies are persistent and stable.

One clear example comes in the world of higher education. Because giving all Americans equal access to elite higher education is a step toward broader societal integration, such efforts must be shut down. To this end, conservative groups are suing colleges even in states such as California, where affirmative action in public universities has long been banned, claiming that the fact that their incoming classes have become more diverse rather than less is evidence of reverse discrimination. At least two conservative justices have objected to color-blind, class-based affirmative-action programs. This approach suggests a topsy-turvy understanding of racial discrimination, in which a diverse classroom is one in which white men have been discriminated against, based on the conviction that white men are by definition the most competent possible candidates.

[Read: Donald Trump is very busy]

When Trump officials speak of a society that is color-blind and merit-based, they do not appear to mean meritocracy or color-blindness in the traditional sense. Instead of individual meritocracy, they seem to be advocating a racial meritocracy, in which the merit of an individual hire or admission can be assessed not by their individual accomplishments but by how well the group they are associated with fits a particular role. In this way, the Great Resegregation seeks firmer moral ground than the racial apartheid of the past. Racial disparities can be framed not as the result of discrimination, but as a fact: that white people are just better and more qualified. And by withholding federal funding from places that engage in scientific inquiry on social inequalities or offer historical instruction that could be seen as portraying America as “fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory,” the Trump administration can make the causes of those inequalities illegible.

What the proponents of the Great Resegregation seek is a counterrevolution not merely in law, but also in culture. The civil-rights revolution of the 1960s changed hearts and minds as well as laws, and one of those changes was that racially exclusive institutions became morally suspect. Notably, Trump officials are not willing to state their aims explicitly; they feel obligated to pay lip service to ideals of color-blind meritocracy and mislead about their intentions.

“My view is that the diversity ethos has really sunk deep roots,” the Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy told me. “There are a lot of people across a wide variety of ideological positions who would not like a racially homogeneous, all-white outfit. Even people who say they’re against affirmative action, they would feel somewhat nervous or somewhat embarrassed or somewhat guilty about that.” Trumpists seek to not just repeal protections against discrimination, but reverse the “diversity ethos” that has enabled America’s tenuous strides toward equality.

And that progress is not only fragile but remarkably incomplete. Neither schools nor workplaces have ever been particularly integrated. Public-school integration stalled long ago. Even prior to the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions, enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at elite universities had stalled at percentages far below their share of the student-age population. Occupational segregation has remained stagnant since the ’90s. Black workers with or without college degrees are concentrated in professions that pay less than those of their white counterparts, despite a rise in Black people obtaining college degrees. Corporate DEI efforts never made much progress on integration to begin with, in part because many of these efforts were more about branding and limiting liability than equal opportunity, and now the federal government will be dead set on reversing whatever headway was made.

“The segregation we see in the labor market right now is three to five times worse than we would expect if race wasn’t a core factor,” Justin Heck of Opportunity@Work, an organization that advocates for workers without college degrees, told me. “We’ve seen it go down a little bit in the years leading up to 1990. But the current world looks the same as it did in 1990. It’s been stagnant or worse, or slightly worse today.” Heck is one of the authors of a 2023 study on occupational segregation published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There are perhaps two exceptions. One is the federal government, where until now, anti-discrimination laws have been strictly enforced. Trump’s cronies have tried to discredit the federal workforce precisely because it is often more meritocratic, and therefore more integrated than the private sector. “It’s harder in a federal-government job to get a position simply through an informal network,” the political scientist Ashley Jardina, who also worked on the NBER study, told me. “Whereas in the private sector, especially in building trades, for example, a lot of people are getting their jobs through their social networks, which are incredibly segregated.”

That is why Trumpists are so focused on “ending DEI” in the federal workforce. They see anti-discrimination and inclusion as a ladder of upward mobility for people they do not believe should have one. Under Trump, a workplace or college that is perceived as too diverse might come under legal scrutiny, effectively enforcing racial quotas. For example, Andrew Bailey, the attorney general of Missouri, is suing the coffee chain Starbucks on the basis that after adopting DEI programs its workforce has become “more female and less white.”

The second place where America has grown more integrated is media and entertainment, arenas highly visible to the public. This has depreciated the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of white racial identity—making those who once held an unquestioned hegemony over American culture feel like something has been stolen from them. And this shift helped fuel the nationwide backlash to diversity efforts that Trump rode to office.

[W. E. B. Du Bois: Strivings of the Negro people]

The slight but substantive integration of characters in film, television, and other forms of entertainment has itself led to a visible backlash, subjecting actors, writers, and other creative workers of color to harassment whenever they participate in a high-profile project, especially in the genres of science fiction or fantasy. An integrated cast, writers’ room, or development team is deemed “woke,” by which critics simply mean integrated, and therefore suspect. A woman, LGBTQ person, or person of color in a leading role is deemed unqualified, or worthy of rejection just because of who they are. What may seem like silly internet controversies are in fact demands for a resegregation of creative workplaces.

“I think probably part of why we observe more integration in some spaces and others also just has a lot to do with the demands that capitalism places on having a market,” Jardina told me. “It earns money for media organizations and studios to diversify their shows and their casts, because there’s a market for that, in the same way that there isn’t in a lot of industries.”

In other words, the exceptions to America’s persistent segregation have taken place in America’s most public-facing professions, among those assigned to interpret the world around them. What people consuming American media see, for the most part, is a mirage of a more integrated America that has yet to come into being. In virtually every other arena—the private-sector workplace, housing, schooling—America remains profoundly segregated, with opportunities limited by class and race.

This is why Trump’s funding freeze has targeted DEI despite no evidence that the government has lowered its standards on behalf of women and minorities. Asked to provide a real example of lowered standards in the military during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was unable to. The U.S. military has long led the way in demonstrating how a diverse workforce yields American excellence—one reason some conservatives are fixated on its relative egalitarianism, which they deride as “wokeness.” Hegseth recently said he believed that “the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength." The Nazis and Confederates learned otherwise.

Of course he himself is an illustration of lowered standards—Hegseth has no demonstrable expertise for the job he was given—but because he is a white man, his qualifications for the job are assumed, as a result of the Trumpist concept of racial meritocracy. This is why the funding freeze is targeting research on inequality. It is why private companies are threatened with government lawsuits and prosecutions if they seek a broader pool of applicants. It is why the Trump administration’s deportations do not target merely undocumented criminals but also immigrants on Temporary Protective Status. It is why Trump’s loyalists are dismantling any and all government programs that might conceivably even the playing field between those born with plenty and those born with little.

For all the big talk about putting an end to “social engineering,” the Great Resegregation is itself a radical attempt to socially engineer America to be poorer, whiter, less equal, and less democratic. Much as the old Jim Crow measures kept many southern white people impoverished and disenfranchised alongside the Black southerners they targeted, the Great Resegregation will leave wealthy white elites with a firmer grip on power and the working classes with fewer opportunities and a weakened social safety net. The only people left with more will be those who already had more than they needed to begin with.