Donald Trump’s first week back in office has felt catastrophic, and Black Americans are reasonably frustrated and concerned with what they’re seeing in news headlines and social media posts. Since the 47th president was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day last week, many Black folks feel that our leaders are too quiet, our rich celebs are doing nothing with the power they have, and that our white colleagues and friends are being passive in the face of blatant discrimination. Black people believe Trump wants to trigger a whole race, but why? In search of answers, I called Rev. William J. Barber III — who, to many people, is the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr.
You’ve seen him on television many times, and probably remember him as a prominent voice after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. His focus is poor people of every race. He’s an American Protestant minister, social activist, professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.
This conversation will be split into several parts, so do come back to The Root for more.
Rev, Barber How bad are things?
The thing we have to have at the moment is a sense of reality. What is happening is bad, but it’s not as bad as when you had the entire Congress —Democrats and Republican, the entire executive [branch], entire state legislatures — all committed to slavery or segregation.
Are you saying we should not be afraid?
First, our fear has to be properly placed. Secondly, things are bad, but we have to look at each one in terms of how bad it is. When the President does an executive order, it is bad, but it’s also not a law forever. An executive order only follows that President. Also, if the Congress has the majority, the Congress can put in a law that makes that executive order permanent, or can take it away. Many politicians right now don’t want to touch this because they don’t want to be seen as negative like that.
Can you speak more about the executive orders?
So what he’s doing is pushing all these massive executive orders, which are bad. It’s one of the things neofascists do: they try to make you feel like you don’t have power. People are saying, “Oh Lord, we just lost the order.”
Let me give you one example. Trump overturned the executive order that’s been in place since Lyndon B. Johnson; it had to do with contracts and minorities. It basically said you could not get a federal contract unless you included women and other minorities. Down through the years, that executive order had been continued by every president. No president has removed it because it would show that they were very racist, but Trump didn’t care. So he comes in and he erases it.
Well, number one, the next president can put it back. The next president could also say, ‘when I’m elected, I’m gonna work with the Congress and make it permanent law. ’ In addition to that, that still doesn’t mean we can’t sue in the courts and argue that it is a violation of equal protection under the law to have this kind of discrimination when it comes to federal funding.
So we cannot say this is the worst we’ve ever seen?
In actuality, we have a divided government. We have a Republican government, with a small majority in the House and a small majority in the Senate. And of course, we have this MAGA president who won, and then lost, and then won. But, we have an election coming up in 2026. The margins that are there [can be overcome] if we work hard and we pay attention to the largest potential swing vote in the country, which is poor and low wage workers.
You’re saying things can change for the Democrats, so much so they can win the House and Senate?
Barber: A lot of the extremism that Trump is showing off the bat is going to cause that, because people are going to be so much in opposition. In fact, I think that the Democratic Party would do well to call themselves the opposition party. And what they should be doing is filing every deal, as if they were in power. For example, if they would file a living wage bill, and say that ‘if we had the power, we would raise the minimum wage to $17 an hour.’ People would know that and see that, and if they meant it, people know they meant it, they would give them the midterm.
Come back for more of our conversation with the Rev. Barber