How the Backlash to the George Floyd Protests Set the Stage for Another Trump Administration
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I'm an attorney, a political commentator, and an immigrant who came to America as an international student in 2008, when I was just 14 years old. In Trump's America, all of these basic facts about my identity fill me with dread.
This year, since assuming office on January 20, President Donald Trump has set about attempting to rapidly dismantle our democracy through an endless stream of executive orders, policy decisions, and blatantly unconstitutional actions and announcements. His strategy to 'flood the zone' is meant to ensure we're too overwhelmed by information to resist, challenge, or even address it all — and it is frighteningly effective. Trump has already completed many of the proposals laid out in Project 2025, the right-wing road map for his administration.
Among many other things, Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of all January 6 insurrectionists; thrown the economy into turmoil with ridiculous tariffs; weaponized Civil Rights era legislation to go after colleges and institutions with policies, scholarships, curricula, or events designed to advance diversity; terminated thousands of workers across the federal government; moved to revoke the legal status of 532,000 Cuban, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Haitian immigrants; dispatched Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to college campuses to target and effectively kidnap international students over their political speech; detained and deported documented and undocumented immigrants, as well as US citizens, without due process; sent immigrants to Guantánamo Bay; signed an executive order ending the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, which has gone before the Supreme Court; threatened and intimidated law firms and judges who do anything he doesn't like; ignored Supreme Court orders to return wrongfully deported people; and posted the private address of the family of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to a Salvadoran mega-prison.
Trump has made clear that he has no regard for the Constitution or its checks and balances, and that those who challenge him can be arrested or deported. Fascism is not on the rise, it's here — and I'm angry about it. But there's a James Baldwin quote I've been quietly repeating to myself over and over since Inauguration Day: 'You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.'
Five years ago Americans watched in horror as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes as he pleaded for his life, cried out for his mother, and took his last breath. Police killed at least 1,159 people in 2020, but the murder of George Floyd resulted in what became arguably the largest civil rights movement in American history.
In the summer of 2020, amid a deadly pandemic, tens of millions of us took to the streets in more than 550 places nationwide to protest not just the murder of George Floyd, but police brutality, inflated police budgets, the prison industrial complex, the police state, and the criminal justice system at large.
Some people romanticize the 2020 protests and Chauvin's conviction for what they believe they represent: proof of a turning point in American history; of Americans finally calling for the dismantling of an oppressive institution. They focus on our collective action and what they believe it accomplished, not the state's response to it.
When I think about the 2020 protests, however, I don't just think about George Floyd or the conviction of Chauvin; I think about the killings of Breonna Taylor, Dreasjohn Reed, Ma'Khia Bryant, and Ahmaud Arbery. I make sure that I think about the many protesters who received excessive charges for exercising their rights. I think about protesters being teargassed and beaten with police batons. I think about the people killed by police at the protests against police brutality, like David McAtee. I think about Kyle Rittenhouse shooting protesters and being turned into a celebrity.
It's important to reflect, not just on our collective actions, but the state's violent response to them — the consequences and the backlash that always follow. Our collective actions are part of an ongoing struggle and resistance, not a final resting place. There will always be a response. The powers that be won't simply acquiesce to our requests without a fight, no matter how many of us protest.
But so many of the people protesting for the first time in 2020 didn't know that. So, in 2021, when we saw police budgets increase and people like 'tough-on-crime' former New York Police Department officer Eric Adams get elected city mayor, they perceived these as fatal blows to the movement, proof that we were failing. I wasn't discouraged, though, because I remembered 2014's Ferguson protests, after 18-year-old Mike Brown was killed by police. I remembered the backlash, the sheer number of activists who were overcharged, imprisoned, or mysteriously died.
I expected the backlash to 2020, and I wasn't discouraged about our potential to overcome it because I've seen it before. I know how we resist — or, at least, that we can resist.
So, when I see Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil get taken by ICE without due process — although I'm heartbroken and terrified about what's happening and what's to come — I have to remind myself of that Baldwin quote. It tells me that we've been here before, that we are familiar with the America Donald Trump wants us to live in, and the tools he wants to use to oppress us.
Trump has only ever promised to move America backwards. 'Make America Great Again' has always meant returning to the past. It's a past where white men dominated; where the rights of women and people of color were restricted; where immigrants and LGBTQ+ people were villainized; and police were encouraged to take up arms against civilians. Trump and his fellow Americans are trying to take us back to the worst of where we've already been.
That's why knowing our history is more important now than ever before. Learning about the power and collective resistance of Black communities, of queer people, of labor organizers, and of immigrants provides us with a road map forward.
Trump isn't creating a fascist new world, he's revitalizing a fascist old one that we have fought before — and that's as terrifying as it is familiar.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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