Which presented Trump with a ripe opportunity to demagogue about supposed reverse racism against white people. As Trump just announced on Truth Social, he has canceled the program, raging that it’s “RACIST.” He fumed: “No more woke handouts based on race!”
What’s more, every red state government had submitted proposals designed to garner their states large amounts of this funding. These proposals were explicitly designed by these GOP governments partly to serve their states’ rural areas.
Murray’s office says this cutoff is illegal, and some of these states will likely sue. “Democrats will fight this every step of the way,” Murray said in an emailed statement.
The Digital Equity Act—which was part of the bipartisan infrastructure law that former president Joe Biden signed in 2021—appropriated over $2 billion for grants to states to improve internet access. As The New York Times reports, states were already in the process of submitting plans to access that grant money, red ones included.
One of these populations is “members of a racial or ethnic minority.” Plainly, that’s what constitutes the “woke handouts based on race” that triggered Trump. After all, it sounds woke, doesn’t it?
Indeed, as the Times story details, the racial component of the law was actually pretty negligible. “The law barely mentions race at all,” the Times observes.
“Individuals living in rural areas face the most urgent needs for broadband availability,” Alabama’s proposal reads. And Iowa’s proposal laments the internet “accessibility gap” that persists “particularly in rural communities.”
This is where Trump entered the picture:
Murray’s office estimates that as much as hundreds of millions of dollars has still not been formally approved.
The irony here is that lack of digital access is a good example of a serious inequity (there’s that “woke” word again!) that impacts both low-income minorities and low-income rural whites in a similar way. This lack of access constitutes an unfairness embedded in the nation’s patchwork infrastructure, something the federal government is well positioned to try to rectify across racial lines. So it’s degenerate nonsense for Trump to pluck out the tiny fraction of this effort aimed at minorities and cast it as racism against white people.
For decades, Republicans have demagogued about Big Government giving handouts to racial minorities, in order to justify slashing government programs in myriad ways that hurt their own voters. This has often been communicated in couched language: For Ronald Reagan it was “welfare queens.” For Mitt Romney, it was the “47 percent” who were “dependent on the government.” For Paul Ryan, it was the “hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens to lives of dependency.”
We constantly hear that Trumpism is supposed to represent a break with that old form of Reaganesque, drown-government-in-the-bathtub, plutocratic GOP ideology, as part of its supposed project to remake the GOP as “working class.” But the reality is that MAGA often takes that old race-baiting trick and, if anything, supercharges its racist overtones. This latest move is a case in point: Once again, here we see Trump carrying out precisely that same old scam. And once again, GOP voters may very well get screwed by it.
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