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civil rights
Trump Appointee With 'History of Discriminatory Practices' Confirmed to Fair Housing Role at HUD
"Millions of Americans already face barriers to housing," said the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. "Appointing someone trying to dismantle civil rights protections will only cause more harm."
Oct 10, 2025
After reports that the Trump administration has gutted its enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, civil rights and housing advocates are warning that the president's newly confirmed appointee to lead the office responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws will seek to further erode civil rights protections.
On Tuesday, the US Senate confirmed Craig Trainor—as part of a group of 107 nominees to various executive posts—to be assistant secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The office is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws, including laws that prohibit housing discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, and sex.
Upon his confirmation, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund (LDF) described Trainor as someone "with a history of discriminatory practices."
With a history of discriminatory practices, Craig Trainor has been confirmed as Assistant Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.Millions of Americans already face barriers to housing. Appointing someone trying to dismantle civil rights protections will only cause more harm.
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— Legal Defense Fund (@legaldefensefund.bsky.social) October 9, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Since February, Trainor has worked as the acting assistant secretary of the Department of Education's (DOE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The National Fair Housing Alliance said that during his tenure in the Education Department, Trainor "has overseen the illegal weaponization of the Department's civil rights authorities for purposes contrary to the advancement of civil rights."
Demetria McCain, the director of policy at the LDF, says "Trainor advanced a radical and inaccurate view of civil rights law that was blocked by federal courts."
In February, Trainor sent a "Dear Colleague" letter describing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives pursued by colleges and K-12 schools as "illegal" forms of discrimination against white and Asian students and threatened federal funding for those that did not comply and reverse the policies.
The LDF sued the DOE in April, calling the effort an attempt "to prohibit and chill lawful efforts to ensure that Black students are afforded equal educational opportunities," and arguing that the DOE was "intentionally discriminating against Black students through its efforts to defund federal grantees based on erroneous facts and interpretations of law." Three federal courts sided with the LDF later that month and blocked Trainor's office from enforcing the demands in the letter.
In the meantime, the OCR also paused thousands of civil rights investigations into discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, and disability. Employees told ProPublica that they declined to open new investigations and were told to stop communicating with students, families, and schools involved in cases launched during previous administrations. One attorney said he and his colleagues had "been essentially muzzled."
Trainor would later unpause some investigations related to disabilities, but others remained on hold. Meanwhile, he launched new "discrimination" investigations, including one highly publicized case against Denver Public Schools for installing an all-gender restroom, which Trainor argued "appears to directly violate the civil rights of the district's female students."
In March and April of 2025, the OCR dismissed civil rights cases at an unprecedented rate of 89-91%, compared to the historic average of around 70%. Meanwhile, the number of cases in which violations were found dropped precipitously, from 200 per month during the Biden years to around 50-60 in April.
"Under the Trump administration, the OCR moved away from addressing systemic discrimination toward a narrower enforcement agenda aligned with the administration's political priorities," read an August report from the human rights group ImpACT International. "For instance, investigations into racial disparities in school discipline—which disproportionately affected Black students and those with disabilities—were deprioritized or outright abandoned. Simultaneously, the OCR shifted intense focus toward investigating transgender students, particularly targeting their participation in girls' and women's sports."
Mike Pillera, a former OCR attorney, said that under the new administration, "OCR is the most useless it's ever been, and it's the most dangerous it's ever been. And by useless, I mean unavailable. Unable to do the work."
In June, following Trainor's nomination for the Fair Housing Office, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled the official, noting that in 2021, he wrote an article titled "George Floyd and the Rise of the Rival Constitution," in which he described the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the catalyst for an "all-embracing ideology of diversity" that threatens the "actual Constitution," which he said he preferred.
Warren also noted that while serving on the New York Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, Trainor dismissed well-documented evidence of discriminatory evictions of minority tenants by New York landlords, suggesting that while it may have occurred "many decades in the past," it was not a problem today.
"It is deeply concerning that the Senate confirmed Craig Trainor to be the administration's top fair housing official without even holding an individualized vote, much less scrutinizing his troubling record," said NFHA Executive Vice President Nikitra Bailey. "This administration has already attacked fair housing enforcement in many ways."
The appointment of Trainor to oversee the Office of Fair Housing comes just weeks after half a dozen whistleblowers told the New York Times that "Trump's political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs."
The majority of staff were axed or reassigned by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the early months of Trump's administration, leaving a skeleton crew to pursue fair housing cases. Staff, meanwhile, brought forward emails showing that Trump appointees systematically obstructed investigations.
Like in the DOE's civil rights office, hundreds of housing discrimination investigations were frozen, and employees were cut off from communication with clients who alleged mistreatment by landlords and banks. Meanwhile, senior officials pressured employees to stop pursuing cases related to decades-old discrimination precedents, such as appraisal bias and redlining that impact the ability of nonwhite families to sell and purchase homes.
Two of the whistleblowers, attorneys Palmer Heenan and Paul Osedebe, reported being fired shortly after the Times report and their complaint to Warren were made public.
Warren joined in criticizing the confirmation of Trainor, whom she noted "is currently being sued by the NAACP for civil rights violations at the Department of Education." His confirmation, she said, "comes just one week after the Trump administration fired and suspended whistleblowers who shared documents with my office describing the administration's systematic attack on civil rights protections in housing in the office Trainor will now lead."
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The Real-Time Demise of American Democracy Under Trump
Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few oligarchs at the expense of working people and ordinary families.
Oct 06, 2025
For generations, Americans have been taught that the United States is the world’s beacon of democracy. Politicians across the spectrum speak of the nation as a “shining city on a hill,” a place where freedom and the rule of law set the standard for the rest of the world. But the truth is harder to swallow: the U.S. is drifting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.
A survey of more than 700 political scientists conducted by Bright Line Watch in 2020 found that the vast majority believe the U.S. is rapidly moving toward some form of authoritarian rule. Scholars rated American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After Donald Trump’s first election in November 2016, they gave it a 67. Several weeks into his second term, the score had plunged to 55. Elections, rights, and freedoms are under attack—and America is running out of time to save its democracy. The experts’ warnings are not abstract; they reflect a country where voter suppression, gerrymandering, corporate influence, a compliant Supreme Court, and executive overreach are eroding the foundations of democratic governance. When citizens are uninformed—or choose not to vote—the systems of power tilt toward elites, making it easier for authoritarian forces to consolidate control. Authoritarian forces also thrive on fear—fear of immigrants, political opponents, or anyone deemed an outsider—turning Americans against one another and eroding the inclusive ideals that once defined the nation as a melting pot.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarian systems is the concentration of power in a single office. In the US, the presidency has been steadily amassing authority for decades. Presidents of both parties have expanded executive power—from Woodrow Wilson, who during and after World War I oversaw a massive expansion of federal authority, centralized control over the economy, and signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent, to more recent administrations. After September 11, 2001, Congress handed the executive branch sweeping powers through the Authorization for Use of Military Force, essentially giving presidents a blank check for war. Since then, presidents have increasingly governed through executive orders and “emergency” declarations, bypassing Congress altogether. Barack Obama further expanded executive authority through extrajudicial drone strikes, targeting individuals abroad without judicial review or due process, demonstrating that executive power can be exercised unilaterally and with limited accountability. Meanwhile, Congress has been paralyzed by polarization and gridlock, leaving lobbyists and corporate donors to fill the vacuum. The Senate’s structure, which gives Wyoming and California the same representation despite a 70-fold population difference, allows minority rule to dominate national policy. Gerrymandering and voter suppression further hollow out electoral accountability. A government that concentrates power in the executive while undermining the voice of ordinary citizens is not functioning as a democracy.
Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action.
Authoritarian governments also justify extraordinary powers in the name of “security.” The U.S. is no exception. The National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed a government that watches its citizens on a scale once unthinkable. At home, local police departments increasingly resemble military units, rolling out armored vehicles and tear gas against peaceful protesters. We saw this during Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter uprisings. The deployment of force against citizens exercising their constitutional rights should alarm anyone who values democracy. Yet the normalization of militarized policing has created what philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote as a “state of exception”—where emergency measures become everyday tools of governance.
Yes, Americans still enjoy constitutional rights—but too often these rights exist more on paper than in practice. Free speech? Tell that to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Snowden, or Reality Winner, who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act for revealing government misconduct. Voting rights? They’ve been under relentless attack, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted protections for minority voters. States have since imposed strict voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, and closed polling places in Black and Latino communities. Even fundamental rights like reproductive freedom are being stripped away. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans. Millions of women and people who can become pregnant no longer have control over their own bodies. That’s not democracy; that’s state control of private life.
Another clear sign of authoritarian drift is the domination of politics by wealthy elites. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, corporations and billionaires have been able to pour unlimited money into elections. Political campaigns are dominated by super PACs and billionaire donors. Our democracy is no longer guaranteed—from Wall Street to the White House, power is slipping into the hands of a few. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in 2014 that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” leaving ordinary voters almost powerless to shape the laws that govern them.
The authoritarian character of the United States cannot be understood solely within its borders. With more than 750 military bases worldwide and a defense budget larger than the next ten nations combined, the United States functions as a global empire. Military interventions—from Iraq to Afghanistan to drone strikes across the Middle East and Africa—have often been launched without meaningful Congressional approval. Empire abroad normalizes authoritarianism at home. Militarized policing, mass surveillance, and a bloated national security state are justified by the logic of “permanent war,” which also benefits defense contractors, private security firms, and other corporate interests that profit from endless conflict. As Hannah Arendt wrote, imperialism abroad often requires repression at home. That warning has become reality.
The United States still holds elections and maintains a written constitution, but appearances are misleading. The US still calls itself a democracy, but in practice, authoritarian forces are calling the shots. What makes American authoritarianism distinctive is its velvet glove: it is not a dictatorship in the classical sense but a regime where democratic symbols cloak undemocratic realities. Its most effective disguise is the illusion of freedom itself—an ideology of free market capitalism that promises choice while consolidating power in the hands of a few. Americans are told they live in the land of opportunity, yet the choices available to them—whether in the marketplace or at the ballot box—are increasingly constrained by corporate monopolies and two political parties beholden to the same economic elites. Recognizing this drift is the first step toward reversing it. Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
It is a bitter irony that 66,000 living World War II veterans—who risked everything to fight authoritarianism abroad—now witness the creeping authoritarianism at home and the steady erosion of the freedoms they fought to secure. Their sacrifices are a reminder that democracy is fragile and must be actively defended.
Unless structural reforms are undertaken—curbing corporate power, restoring voting rights, protecting civil liberties, and demilitarizing both foreign and domestic policy—the United States risks cementing its place not as the defender of democracy but as an exemplar of its decline.
Democracy is not self-sustaining. If Americans care about preserving freedom, they must act: vote in every election—from school boards to city councils to state legislatures—and recognize that their power extends beyond the ballot box. As consumers and shareholders, they can choose carefully which corporations they support, amplifying businesses that align with democratic values while withdrawing support from those that undermine them. Citizens can also engage directly with elected officials, starting meaningful discussions to make their voices heard, and volunteer with nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy organizations and watchdog groups that protect the democratic process, civil rights, and corporate and government accountability and transparency. Pushing for structural reforms that rein in executive power and corporate influence, challenging fear-mongering narratives, and defending the rights of marginalized communities are all essential steps to reclaiming and preserving democracy.
We each have a role to play. Wake up, America! It’s one thing to recognize the nation’s slide toward authoritarianism and complain about it—it’s another entirely to take action. Be no bystander; democracy depends on participation. We ignore its demise at our peril.
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Stop Trump and His Supreme Court From Tightening the Circle of Personhood
The right-wing Supreme Court, in rulings on Trump administration policies, has done its best to murder what's left of civil rights in the United States.
Sep 26, 2025
Warning: dangers in the mirror are often closer than they may appear. In other words, the next few paragraphs may seem to be hyperbole but are, in fact, expressions of reality (animated by a cold fury).
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder what’s left of civil rights in this country. As Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported, in an unsigned 6-3 ruling, it overturned a lower court’s order forbidding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol in Los Angeles from stopping, interrogating, and detaining people based on any of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they do.”
Those six conservative justices might as well have stood in front of the court and set fire to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation and discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin in a wide variety of venues and actions, including public accommodations, education, the provision of government services, housing, transportation, and voting. The Civil Rights Act outlawed exactly the kind of racial profiling now being practiced—and permitted by our highest court—in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
While they were at it, those six robed arsonists might as well have burnt the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which outlaws unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a court-issued warrant for arrests. They could have added the 14th Amendment to their bonfire, which was one of three passed and ratified during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Those three amendments established full citizenship rights for emancipated Blacks and future generations of US denizens, regardless of race. The 13th Amendment, of course, outlawed slavery, and the 15th secured voting rights for all (male) citizens regardless of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. The 14th Amendment, while establishing birthright citizenship, also guarantees “all persons” (regardless of citizenship status) due process under the law—including those suspected of being in the country illegally.
Centuries of Struggle Undone
No one gave us those rights. Successive generations of Americans fought for them, starting in the late 1780s and in the 1791 passage of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution. That’s when the Fourth Amendment established the rights that centuries later would be invoked to prevent people from being stopped for “driving while Black” or seeking work while looking Latino. (It’s also when, thanks to the First Amendment, we secured freedom of speech and the press, which gives me the right to state publicly, even in the wake of his despicable assassination, that the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, built his organization on explicit contempt for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.)
It took a civil war and the deaths of almost 700,000 soldiers on both sides to end legal slavery in this country and give us those three Reconstruction amendments, passed between 1865 and 1870.
As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
And it took decades of mostly nonviolent struggle and sacrifice (and more deaths) to win passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Those two laws essentially reiterated the same rights that had been secured back in the 1860s but had been denied in practice in the Southern states of the former Confederacy. “Denial” is a weak word for the life-destroying discrimination and segregation that was then systematically enforced by state-sponsored terrorism (all too often in the form of lynching) against those accused of violating the Jim Crow regime of that era.
The Supreme Court had already torn the guts out of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, deciding in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a history of race-based voter suppression would no longer have to seek “preclearance” from the Department of Justice for changes to their voting procedures. The court’s argument was essentially that voting discrimination no longer exists in the states named in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, observing that ending preclearance was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
The fact that a storm of suppression was indeed still raging became clear almost immediately, as affected states began passing laws making it more difficult for people of color to vote. Ironically, US President Donald Trump’s crew hasn’t yet completely purged the Department of Justice’s website of support for voting rights. You can, for instance, still find there a 2023 blog post by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke lamenting the depredations of Shelby and praising the Biden administration’s support for the—never passed—John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as a remedy.
Now, in a one-paragraph decision, the six right-wing justices, appointed by a series of Republican presidents including Trump, have made another contribution to his administration’s all-out attack on race and gender equality. Justice Brett Kavanaugh found it necessary to amplify the court’s decision in a lengthy concurrence. In words untethered from the real world, he wrote:
The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”
Let me repeat that: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” Tell that to Kilmar Abrego García.
Oh, California
In the last few decades, some very bad ideas have come out of my own state, California. This may surprise readers who think of Californians as living in a great blue expanse on the country’s “Left Coast.” They may think our governor, Gavin Newsom, is an avatar of liberalism. (Despite my criticisms of the man, I will admit that his recent trolling of Donald Trump’s ALL-CAPS MEDIA STYLE is pretty funny.)
Nevertheless, some seriously bad ideas have triumphed as ballot propositions here. In 1978, there was Proposition 13, which made it all but impossible to raise taxes in the state—especially property taxes, which provide almost half the funding for our public schools. That “taxpayer revolt” (as it came to be known) spread rapidly to other states. Then, in 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson transformed his flagging reelection campaign by inflaming white anxiety about immigration in California. He launched a series of TV ads with the tag line “they keep coming,” a reference to people crossing the Mexican border looking for work in my state. Weaponizing white anxiety was something Donald Trump would borrow when he ran for president in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
To ramp up his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Wilson endorsed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, or “Save Our State” initiative. And Californians then indeed did reelect him, while passing the proposition, which outlawed the provision of any government services—including healthcare and education—to any undocumented immigrant. Government employees at any level were required to report anyone (including schoolchildren) they suspected of being in the country illegally. In language forebodingly similar to the rhetoric of both of Trump’s presidential campaigns and his two administrations, Proposition 187 began:
The People of California find and declare as follows:
That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.
What happens in California doesn’t always stay in California. As the Washington Post reported 25 years later, “Since 1994, 65 initiatives and referendums to change state immigration laws were attempted via direct democracy mechanisms.”
Almost immediately, federal courts prevented the implementation of most parts of Proposition 187. Three decades later, however, the Supreme Court has effectively validated Proposition 187’s premise, permitting the use of racial profiling to identify possible “illegal aliens.”
The right wing wasn’t done with legislating racism in my state. In 1996, Proposition 209, also known by the (completely unironic) ironic title its proponents gave it, the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” outlawed affirmative action at any level of government in the state, including access to public colleges and universities.
Though it faced legal challenges, Proposition 209 remains in force today. There’s no doubt that earlier Supreme Court decisions, including the 1978 finding in University of California v. Bakke, had indeed laid the groundwork for it. In it, a 30-year-old white man had challenged his rejection by the medical school at the University of California, Davis. He sued and was eventually admitted. In his case, the court upheld the principle of affirmative action to address racial or other discrimination against protected classes of persons, but outlawed specific numerical quotas.
By 2023, however, an ever more right-leaning Supreme Court had ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that affirmative action violates the equal protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
Then, in 1998, another ballot initiative outlawed most bilingual education in California public schools (though it was finally repealed at the ballot box in 2016).
Disparate Impact
By 2003, however, in part because of changes to the demographic makeup of the electorate, California voters had had enough of legally weaponizing white anxiety. They roundly rejected Proposition 54, known as the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California put it, “would have banned most agencies from collecting data on race, ethnicity, and national origin, with disastrous consequences for health, education, public safety, and civil rights.”
But in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the right-wing strategists for a second Trump presidency made it very clear that their plans included implementing a national version of the Racial Privacy Initiative. The author of the section on labor advocated prohibiting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such data, he wrote, “can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons.
It seems that Donald Trump agrees. In April 2025, he issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” In it, he noted that “disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.” Trump and his handlers don’t see taking systemic racism and contemporary bias into consideration as a solution to a problem. Such consideration is the problem. “It not only undermines our national values,” says the order, “but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.”
Whatever Trump may decree, current employment law (as implied in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmed in 1970 by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., and codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act passed under the presidency of George H.W. Bush) supports the use of disparate impact. As of now, plaintiffs can still seek to prove discrimination by demonstrating the disparate impact of a company’s “facially neutral” hiring, firing, or promotion policies. How long will it be, however, before this Supreme Court reverses decades of progress in equal employment?
We’ve already seen the “disparate impact” of Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency’s destruction of the federal workforce, which has disproportionately affected Blacks, and especially Black women. It’s a major factor explaining why 300,000 Black women have lost jobs since Trump took office.
If you have any doubt whether race (and sex) bias continues to exist at the highest levels in this administration, consider the words of a man Trump thought of as “sort of like a son,” the recently assassinated right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk:
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
And about a list of prominent Black women, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kirk said: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Circling Backwards?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons. At first, that circle contained only high-born men. Centuries of struggle saw the inclusion of men without noble birth, and later without property. Racial concepts, themselves a human invention, long excluded men who were not deemed white. Eventually, fitfully, they, too, were admitted to the circle of personhood. Most recently, women seem to have become persons, and with that addition, people of a variety of genders and sexual orientations have also joined the circle.
But right now, six people on the Supreme Court, along with the Trump administration, are doing all they can to tighten that previously ever-widening circle of personhood and Donald Trump is on board in a big-time way. Let us hope that we can stop them from turning that circle into a noose.
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