TRUMP’S ASSAULT ON EQUALITY, EQUITY GAINS SPEED

Remember when Donald Trump told minority voters, “Vote for me. What have you got to lose?”

Now we know.

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to The New York Times.

And why not? Isn’t discrimination against white people the pressing civil rights issue of our time?

The New York Times obtained a document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, which seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies, but the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses. Further, both supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.

The document also suggests the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section which is run by career civil servants with civil rights experience involving schools and universities.

This comes on the heels of the ACLU discovering that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who heads the Trump administration’s voter fraud commission (the one trying to prove Trump’s false claim that he lost the country’s popular vote because 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton), is poised to attack a federal voting rights law that prevents states from capriciously purging citizens from the voting rolls. Kobach wants Congress to pass amendments that he is writing for the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the motor voter law.

The Justice Department’s planned assault on affirmative action also follows Trump’s recently tweeted ban on transgender people in the military — a policy change generals and other military leaders are saying will hurt our troops and defense.

And last week, the Justice Department, without being asked, filed a brief in a private employment discrimination lawsuit. The brief urges an appeals court not to interpret the ban on sexbased discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as covering sexual orientation.

The Trump administration’s priorities are warped, and they are warped in a way that seems brazenly designed to be divisive.

These are priorities and policies that amount to a collective assault on both equality and equity. They all fit right in with Trump’s denigrating campaign rhetoric about women, Latinos, Muslims, the handicapped, Black Lives Matter and other groups.

Each also offers Trump yet another dog whistle to white supremacists and his dwindling base, while simultaneously providing new distractions from the Russia investigation and the country’s other real and mounting problems.

The New York Times noted Wednesday that the Justice Department declined to provide more details about its reverse discrimination policy plans. Justice also declined to make the acting head of the civil rights division, John Gore, available for an interview.

Really? Who does Gore work for? As a government servant, he works for us, and these new questionable proposals deserve discussion.

In 2016, the Supreme Court addressed affirmative action admissions policies, voting 4 to 3 to uphold a race-conscious program at the University of Texas at Austin. But there are several additional pending lawsuits at other colleges.

This announcement is another indication that Trump’s and Attorney General Jeff Sessions will keep looking for ways around Supreme Court decisions that the administration and conservatives in the GOP don’t like.

This country was built on the ideals of both equality and equity — though many people, especially in the Trump administration, seem to have trouble grasping this.

It’s not a new concept.

Thomas Jefferson is said to have paraphrased Aristotle about it: “Nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.”

That brings us to equity, which is more about fairness than about sameness.

Trump has long said he knows more than the generals, and apparently he believes he’s smarter than our founders and Aristotle, too.