Angry Trump Kills 'Woke' Program—and Accidentally Screws MAGA Voters

Yahoo

10-05-2025

The other day, during his intensive daily reading of complex policy papers, President Donald Trump noticed that a government initiative created by his predecessor had the word 'equity' in its title. Naturally, this caught his attention. As he appeared to conclude, this could only mean the initiative was designed to help undeserving minorities.
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!'
Except there's a problem here. The program in question, the Digital Equity Act, contained huge amounts of money for governments in GOP-run states, as well as Democratic ones, to expand high-speed internet access in underserved communities—very much including red states' rural areas.
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.
While much of that money has already been granted, large sums still have not, according to the office of Senator Patty Murray, who is monitoring these expenditures as ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. With Trump moving to block these funds, these states now could be denied some or possibly all of that money, Murray's office says.
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.
In this saga, we once again see Trump—who is supposed to be remaking the GOP into a 'working-class party'—employing precisely the same race-mongering scam that Republicans have used for a very long time to downsize 'Big Government' in ways that hurt their own voters.
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.
Here's where the story gets funny—or perhaps sad. Under the law, the federal government recognizes 'covered populations' that are underserved by high-speed internet. Each state's plan is supposed to be designed to use federal money to expand access to those populations.
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?
But as it happens, some of the other 'covered populations' include 'veterans' and 'people living in rural areas,' as well as 'low-income households.' Guess what: Those aren't necessarily minorities, and red states have a lot of people in those categories too!
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.
But here's the real rub of the matter. A number of red states' proposals—submitted, again, to access federal money for themselves—explicitly detailed how they intend to use that money to expand digital access to their veterans and to their rural residents. You can see that in proposals submitted by Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, and many others.
'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.'
Here's the other rub of the matter. As of now, under the law, the federal government has approved tens of millions of dollars to well over a dozen red states, along with a lot of blue states. But many of these states don't have full access to that money, pending their completion of further steps in the approval process, Murray's office tells me.
This is where Trump entered the picture:
It's anybody's guess how serious Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick really is about this. But if the Commerce Department, which is implementing this law, follows Trump's command, it will do all it can to halt these payments.
Murray's office estimates that as much as hundreds of millions of dollars has still not been formally approved.
'It's insane that Trump is blocking resources to help make sure kids in rural school districts can get online all because he doesn't like the word 'equity,'' Murray, who originally sponsored this law, said in her statement. 'My Republican colleagues will need to explain to their constituents why the rural schools they represent won't get this funding for hotspots or laptops in the meantime.'
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.
'In today's world, everything is online, and yet folks in rural areas, low-income households, and racial and ethnic minorities all suffer from the same challenge—barriers that keep people offline,' Amy Huffman, policy director at the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, told me. 'It's absurd to say this is reverse racism.'
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.