In an explosive narrative on Nicolle Wallace’s panel, Professor Eddie Glaude did not mince words about why Trump gets away with his unadulterated evil.
Dr. Eddie Glaude: Who is America?
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Summary
Dr. Eddie Glaude warns that Donald Trump’s latest immigration crackdown—sweeping ICE raids in Los Angeles—strips away any remaining pretense of civility in U.S. politics and invites Americans to revel openly in xenophobia and cruelty. The raids serve as political theater that distracts from Trump’s deeper project: transferring wealth upward while hollowing out social programs.
Key take-aways
- Trump’s June 2025 deployment of ICE and National Guard troops in L.A. neighborhoods mirrors a modern “fugitive-slave” dynamic, forcing bystanders to choose between solidarity and complicity.
- Dr. Glaude argues that Trump grants supporters “license to be who they really are,” normalizing public displays of racism and violence.
- The media spectacle surrounding the raids diverts attention from the administration’s push for a tax bill that overwhelmingly benefits wealthy households while slashing Medicaid and SNAP.
- Polling shows only a small minority backs mass deportations of long-settled immigrants, yet fear-mongering still drives policy.
- International observers note a dramatic decline in America’s moral standing as images of children torn from parents circulate worldwide.
Progressives view these events as a stark reminder that unchecked executive power, combined with capitalist extraction, endangers democracy and demands an urgent, multiracial popular response.
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The Los Angeles raids began at dawn on June 8, 2025, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swept through Boyle Heights and Huntington Park. Local officials condemned the operation as an unconstitutional show of force, while state attorneys filed suit against the White House. Independent journalists streamed footage of armored vehicles outside elementary schools, and global outlets such as El País called the images “a defining stain on U.S. credibility.” Mainstream networks soon confirmed that detentions targeted mixed-status families rather than individuals with violent records, contradicting administration claims. Reports from ABC News and The Guardian detailed how entire apartment blocks were cordoned off as agents demanded papers from anyone who “looked foreign.”
Into this turmoil stepped Dr. Eddie Glaude on MSNBC, asserting that Trump “gives Americans license to be who they really are.” His televised comment crystallized what many observers sensed: the president transforms latent prejudice into public ritual. Conservative outlets attempted to dismiss the critique, but even right-leaning Yahoo News acknowledged that Glaude’s words captured the administration’s deliberate provocation strategy. By framing immigrants as existential threats, Trump invites supporters to embrace vigilante impulses once confined to the digital fringe.
The distraction works in tandem with economic plunder. While cable panels fixate on border-war imagery, GOP leaders rush a tax bill through Congress that the Congressional Budget Office says will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit and strip over $600 billion from Medicaid over ten years. Business Insider notes that six Nobel-Prize economists warn the bill “exacerbates inequality by design.” A deeper dive by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that households in the top 1 percent would reap nearly three-quarters of the benefits once estate-tax changes and capital-gains cuts phase in. Trump’s shock politics thus create cover for the very wealth transfer: demonize the vulnerable, loot the commons.
Yet public sentiment remains less draconian than the headlines suggest. A long-running Pew Research survey finds that barely 15 percent of Americans favor deporting long-settled undocumented neighbors, even as 87 percent back removing violent offenders—precisely the nuance lost in Trump’s blanket raids. In other words, a majority still upholds humane values when not whipped into panic by presidential spectacle.
Historically, the moment echoes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled every citizen to act as a bounty hunter for human chattel. ICE’s demand that landlords, school officials, and even clergy surrender immigrants resurrects that coerced complicity. Scholars warn that such state-mandated collaboration corrodes civic trust and widens the moral gulf between law and justice, conditions ripe for authoritarian drift.
International reaction underscores the cost. The Washington Post reports that several European cities now advise travelers of “heightened civil-rights risks” in parts of the United States—a reversal of the post-World War II image of America as a refuge. Foreign ministers from Mexico, Canada, and France jointly condemned the raids, signaling a rare trilateral rebuke of U.S. domestic policy.
Progressives interpret these converging crises as evidence that capitalist nationalism depends on racial division. Trump’s raids do more than remove immigrants; they model a society where profit trumps empathy and state violence disciplines dissent. Yet resistance takes root in abolitionist lineages: community rapid-response networks shield neighbors; union locals warn employers against unlawful collaboration; California lawmakers move to sever state contracts with private detention firms. Civil-rights attorneys mobilize class-action suits, while health-care advocates spotlight how Medicaid cuts will hit the same working-class regions Trump claims to champion.
In this contest, clarity is power. Dr. Glaude’s insistence that Americans confront “who they really are” refuses the comfort of denial. It challenges progressives to build a politics grounded in multiracial solidarity and material justice—expanding labor rights, guaranteeing universal health care, and taxing concentrated wealth to fund climate resilience. Trump’s spectacle may mesmerize, but it also exposes the machinery of exploitation in plain sight. The task now is to transform that revelation into enduring, democratic institutions that honor every worker’s dignity—documented or not—and reclaim the nation’s promise from the grip of fear and greed.
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