Trump may not have lowered food prices, but he did

When Donald Trump recently ran for president, he made dozens of promises to the American people, but only kept one.

In 2024, political pundits and operatives saw affordability as the key issue of the presidential campaign. Trump certainly played it: during the election campaign, fiance that would reduce inflation and make food cheaper again, and when he won, observers accredited that strategy for your victory.

But that’s because the president’s real campaign promise wasn’t about the economy. Instead, it was all about racism.

When he returned to the White House, he immediately began to deliver on both explicit promises and unspoken implications.

“This is the administration weaponizing the president’s social and political views,” said William Roberts, senior vice president for rights and justice at the Center for American Progress, a think tank that promotes liberal policies., he told News themezone.

“It’s not just ‘Donald Trump is racist,’” Roberts said. “It’s the Trump administration engaging in policymaking to harm certain people.”

Illustration: News themezone; Photos: Getty

There has been a clear dividing line between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the worst excesses of his second term: During the 2024 presidential campaign, a viral claim about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, where approximately 10,000 Haitians had arrived in recent years, also caught Trump’s attention. He repeated the racist rumor during a presidential debate with his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people who came in were eating the cats. They were eating the pets of the people who lived there.”

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, repeated the rumor and added his own claims, including that Haitians were bringing diseases to Ohio. But Vance also essentially admitted that he was lying.

“If I have to create stories to get the American media to really pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said in an interview with CNN in September 2024.

Suddenly, Haitian immigrants across the United States became targets. In Springfield, Ohio, schoolchildren were subjected to bomb threats, and in small towns in Pennsylvania and Alabama with significant Haitian populations, residents feared for their safety.

The fact that Trump faced no consequences and was instead rewarded with another chance at the presidency has enabled even more blatant lies about marginalized populations, often immigrants, with deadly results.

In December 2025, a viral video alleging fraud at daycares run by Somalis in the Minneapolis area caught the attention of the Trump administration. Nick Shirley, the right-wing agitator who made the video, claimed that he had They discovered a fraud worth 100 million dollars. (Minnesota officials investigated his claims and, during surprise inspections, he discovered that all the daycares featured in his videos were operating as expected.) But still, Trump sent federal agents to “investigate.”

Before the surge of federal agents in Minnesota, Trump had referred to Somalis, including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), as “trash.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep bringing trash into our country.” he said at a Cabinet meeting last November.

“The administration wants to make this country whiter. These are white nationalist beliefs.”

– Seth Levi, director of strategy at the Southern Poverty Law Center

But as president, Trump doesn’t have to pay lip service to racist rumors on the Internet. You can use the full force of the federal government.

The Department of Homeland Security deployed thousands of immigration agents to Minneapolis, which has the largest Somali population in the United States. Just two days after what DHS called its largest immigration operation ever, Renee Good, 37, a white mother of three who appeared to be participating in a protest, was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, while she sat in her car.

She was just the latest person to be shot by federal agents, joining people like Kevin Porter, who was shot to death in Los Angeles, and Marimar Martinez, who survived a shooting in Chicago, but her death sparked widespread protests in Minneapolis and beyond.

AP Photo/Mark Vancleave

“Calling everything you don’t like ‘Nazi propaganda’ is boring,” a DHS spokesperson told News themezone in an emailed statement. “DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed about our historic effort to make America safe again.”

“The administration wants to make this country whiter,” Seth Levi, director of strategy at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told News themezone. “These are white nationalist beliefs that we have seen on the margins for decades, but are becoming mainstream thinking by the administration.”

In Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Charlotte, immigrant communities and their allies have also been subjected to an unprecedented bombardment, all planned by Trump during the election campaign.

In 2024, Trump said that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, was a “war zone” run by members of the Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization based in Venezuela. But even Republican city officials said the claims were false and that Aurora was safe for families.

“It’s like an invasion from within and we’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said in September of that year. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”

Trump continued the fiction in his second term by attacking Latino men across the country and accusing them of being gang members, even if the evidence was slim. In March, the Department of Homeland Security sent hundreds of men, mostly Venezuelans, to a prison in El Salvador known for its human rights abuses. The men had not been tried or sentenced and many had no criminal records.

When advocates filed a lawsuit accusing immigration officials of illegally targeting people based on their race, the Supreme Court, where a third of the justices have been appointed by Trump, ruled 6-3 in favor of allowing it. Ethnicity, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his opinion, “may be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered alongside other salient factors.”

Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images

Beyond the violence that Trump has the power to allow as president, there are indirect effects.

“It creates a permission structure to say these things openly,” Levi said. “These are not new feelings or beliefs, but people used to recognize them as taboo and kept them to themselves.”

As Trump steps up his deportation efforts, everyday people are trying to help him. there has been multiple instances of people in public ration deportation officials, even directing them toward immigrants.

“Jim Crow was not held back only by policies, but by ordinary people,” Roberts said, referring to the set of racially discriminatory laws, violence and social structures that oppressed blacks in the American South for nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery.

In many ways, it may be too late to put this genie back in the bottle. Immigration enforcement is only the most visible and latest manifestation of the administration’s agenda.

During his first days in office, Trump signed an executive order prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal government. The administration quickly went to work to fire employees who did diversity work and dismantle programs that didn’t align with their worldview.

Although the executive order did not apply to private companies, industry leaders followed suit and began Backing away from their DEI promises also.

The attack on the government was especially big blow for black workerswho are overrepresented as federal employees because public sector jobs have traditionally been more welcoming to people of color.

Trump also signed or denes that dismantled DEI in K-12 public schools and community colleges, while demanding that elite universities hand over their career and admissions data. The administration has been using accusations of anti-Semitism or claims that race is being illegally used as an admissions factor to pressure schools to favor a more right-wing agenda, even as it puts similar pressures on students themselves. Thousands of international students have lost their ability study in the united states

And DHS officials began attacking college students with views they didn’t like, including Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student who led pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was arrested about his beliefs last March.

It all happens at least with the excuse, if not the genuine belief, that Trump has a mandate from the people. He made it very clear throughout his campaign that mass deportations, the demonization of the other, and the acceptance of intolerance would dominate his second term.

t This is what they voted for. And that is what has happened.

“It really encourages people to treat others however they want,” Roberts said. “[His policies] “It will resurrect much of the racial animosity that has always existed in America.”

Despite his lofty promises about the economy, affordable food and the dawn of a new golden age, there seems to be only one true constant in the Trump administration.

“People sometimes have a tendency to overthink and overanalyze because we don’t want to accept the most obvious explanation in front of us,” Levi said.

“But when the administration is tweeting Nazi memes and songs, I really don’t think there’s a nuanced view of that,” he continued. “They’re being pretty clear about what some of their beliefs are.”