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discrimination
Resisting Authoritarianism by Exhaustion: Why We Must Fight Trump’s New Travel Ban
Despite affecting far more people than the 2017 ban, Trump's second ban passed almost without notice: no airport protests, no sustained outrage, and little public awareness that it had happened at all.
Jan 15, 2026
Just a week after Donald Trump first took office as president, he signed Executive Order 13769—his first travel ban. It halted refugee admissions and suspended entry into the US for citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. All of these countries have a Muslim majority. Because of that, and also because Trump had previously said that he intends to ban Muslims from the US, critics referred to the order as a “Muslim ban.”
The backlash was immediate and broad, coming from Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as US diplomats, business leaders, universities, faith groups, and international organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International. Protests erupted in airports and cities across the US. A friend and I—both of us immigrants to the US ourselves—spontaneously drove to the international airport in Houston to express our outrage, along with hundreds of other protesters. I remember I felt hopeful. Surely, even people who didn’t come out to the airport would recoil once they learned what the order was actually doing to real human beings—for example, to the 78-year-old Iranian grandmother, certainly not a threat to national security, who came to the US with a valid visa to visit her children, as she did every year. She was detained for 27 hours at LAX, denied access to lawyers, and fell ill before finally being allowed to enter the country.
Today, nine years later and one year into the second Trump presidency, I’m less hopeful. On the first day of 2026, a proclamation signed by Trump took effect, expanding an earlier travel restriction to 39 countries. Citizens of these countries, as well as holders of travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority, are generally barred from obtaining visitor, student, exchange, or immigrant visas. Turkmenistan is a partial exception: Its citizens may obtain nonimmigrant visas such as tourist, student, or exchange visas, but immigrant visas remain suspended. The other countries subject to the ban are Afghanistan, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, the Gambia, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Together, they make up about 20% of the world’s countries.
Despite affecting far more people than the 2017 ban, this one passed almost without notice: no airport protests, no sustained outrage, and little public awareness that it had happened at all. This is partly because it has become impossible to keep up with the incessant noise coming from the White House, which Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon has explained is strategic: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” As the noise about the Nobel Peace Prize, the “War on Christmas,” shower pressure, and wind turbines causing cancer absorbs public attention, Trump advances a steady program of norm breaking and lawlessness. The ongoing extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the illegal abduction of Nicolás Maduro, the threats against Greenland, the masked federal agents terrorizing communities across the US, the separation of families and disappearances of people to inhumane prisons at home and abroad, and the cuts in foreign aid that have already cost countless lives are just some examples. In normal times, none of these would be partisan issues. But these are not normal times.
Entire populations are labeled as dangerous or undesirable, reinforcing discrimination and social exclusion both inside and outside the US.
As understandable and human it is that many of us are worn down by a sustained state of outrage, we must pay attention and cannot allow exhaustion to harden into indifference. Silence is complicity, and complicity is not an option.
On a human level, the January 1 travel ban means this: Students who earned admission to US universities and secured funding after years of studying and planning are now barred from enrolling, losing scholarships and life-changing educational opportunities. Students who already started academic programs in the US and traveled home to renew their visas cannot return to finish their degrees. Parents with lawful status in the US are unable to have their children abroad come and join them, leaving families indefinitely separated. Children are prevented from traveling to the US to sit with a dying parent, attend a funeral, or provide end-of-life care. Married couples, fiancés, and partners are forced into separation. Patients who rely on specialized or lifesaving treatment available only in the US are prevented from entering. Professionals and academics are unable to attend conferences. Entrepreneurs and businesspeople are blocked from attending critical meetings or negotiating deals. Entire populations are labeled as dangerous or undesirable, reinforcing discrimination and social exclusion both inside and outside the US.
This is not an exhaustive list, but merely a snapshot of the devastating and entirely predictable consequences of Trump’s new travel ban. Like its predecessors, it is not a security measure. It is a choice to inflict harm on ordinary people, and this choice is deliberately cruel. As I’m writing this, the Trump administration has announced a further escalation: the suspension of immigrant visas for 75 countries, a move that primarily affects families by closing the door on reunification. If we meet such policy choices with silence, authoritarianism has already won.
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What's at Stake When the President Uses the R-Word
The real question is not whether Trump is allowed to use degrading language, but whether a president who does so honors the dignity of the office—or hollows it out from within.
Dec 27, 2025
When a president uses language that dehumanizes, it is not a matter of legality, it is a matter of dignity, and it signals who our society values. Every utterance from the Oval Office carries weight; it sets norms, authorizes behaviors, and communicates whose humanity is recognized and whose is diminished.
When President Donald Trump referred to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz using the R-word, defenders rushed in with a familiar refrain: freedom of speech. He can say what he wants. He is protected. End of discussion.
But this is not a freedom-of-speech question. It is a freedom-of-dignity question.
Donald Trump is not a private citizen muttering into the void. He is the most powerful person in the world, speaking through a global amplifier backed by the authority of the presidency. The real question is not whether he is allowed to use degrading language, but whether a president who does so honors the dignity of the office—or hollows it out from within.
A president’s words do more than reveal character; they instruct the nation in who it is permitted to become.
Some defenders argue that only the N-word merits being reduced to an initial, that if Trump wants to use “retarded,” he can—and so can anyone else. They dismiss criticism as cancel culture, another example of Democrats weaponizing political correctness.
This defense is morally hollow. Saying, “Only the N-word counts” is an impoverished standard. Harmful language does not become acceptable simply because it targets a different group. The R-word is not neutral—it has been used for decades to demean, exclude, and dehumanize people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, reducing human beings to a punchline or a flaw.
This is not about partisan loyalty or performative outrage. It is about whether we believe people deserve basic dignity regardless of disability. If you had a child, a sibling, or a close friend with an intellectual or developmental disability, would you really argue that the most powerful person in the country should be excused for using a word that has long diminished their worth? Would that feel like free speech, or like indifference?
Leadership is not only about what one is legally permitted to say. It is about what one chooses to say. Leaders set norms. When they adopt language that punches down, they grant permission for others to follow. Calling that out is not political correctness; it is a minimal ethical expectation of public leadership.
BJ Stasio, a Peer Specialist 2 with the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities, explains:
When national leaders use the R-word casually, it reactivates real harm for people who were once labeled, limited, and underestimated. As someone who has lived with that label—and now leads within the disability rights movement—I know firsthand what the stigma can do.
Nicole LeBlanc, a disability employment consultant and self-advocacy adviser, underscores the emotional and systemic toll:
Seeing the R-word insult return to everyday language is enraging. Many people with autism—especially those diagnosed in adulthood—carry complex trauma histories from bullying and verbal abuse. Research shows they are more likely to be bullied than the general population, leading to high rates of PTSD, anxiety, and other challenges. People with disabilities want respect, love, acceptance, and access to services that allow us to thrive, not just survive. Using hateful language fuels negative attitudes, health disparities, and higher abuse rates. Respect is not optional.
Emauni Crawley, a behavioral health coach and disability advocate, is blunt:
The manner in which Trump articulates the R-word is not a result of ignorance. It is an act of perverseness.
Dr. Gary Schaffer, professor of school psychology, mental health counselor, author, and a person with disabilities, adds historical context:
The R-word is not neutral. It is hate speech, reducing learning and behavioral differences to something laughable and diminishing a person’s value to society. When the president of the United States uses it openly, he gives a green light to discriminate, segregate, and withhold empathy—not only from people with intellectual disabilities, but from anyone with learning or behavioral differences.
This danger is not theoretical. Prior to 1975, many students with disabilities were denied access to education entirely because they were deemed incapable of learning. Language paved the way for policy. It always does.
Max Donatelli, a US Air Force Vietnam veteran, disability advocate, and parent, put it plainly:
The public disrespect shown by this president to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is unprecedented. Our country deserves better. As a parent and advocate, we have found it challenging to rid our language of the R-word at the local, state, and national levels. We helped New York State end its use of it in the office that administers services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. What was once the Office for Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities is now the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, thanks to significant advocacy. Our wonderful son Craig, who has Down syndrome, deserves the respect and opportunities afforded all citizens. The use of this slur is a stain on this presidency that won’t be forgotten by us.
The R-word entered medical and educational usage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a supposedly humane replacement for earlier slurs. By the 1960s and 1970s, it had become an everyday insult. Its harm was so widespread that it was removed from professional, legal, and clinical use, replaced by terms such as intellectual disability and developmental disability. Organizations like the Special Olympics have spent decades urging the public to abandon the word entirely.
Trump’s use of it is therefore not accidental, nostalgic, or brave. It is regressive. It communicates that labeling human beings this way is acceptable—even legitimate. Taboos are ethical boundaries. When a president violates them intentionally, the violation instructs.
Words alone are dangerous. When paired with policy, the harm compounds. Rhetoric that degrades, combined with policies that strip protections, sends a clear message about whose lives are valued and whose are negotiable. Programs like SOAR, which helped people with severe mental health challenges access Social Security benefits and provided housing, healthcare, and stability. Cutting them leaves people exposed. The erosion of special education, weakening of Americans with Disabilities Act guidance, and refusal to provide real-time American Sign Language interpretation at White House events send the same message: Accessibility is optional; inclusion is an inconvenience.
Harm becomes systemic not all at once, but sentence by sentence, joke by joke, policy memo by policy memo. The erosion of dignity rarely announces itself as violence. It begins as permission—to mock, dismiss, reduce. When that permission comes from the highest office in the land, it spreads.
This is not about fragility. It is about responsibility. A president’s words do more than reveal character; they instruct the nation in who it is permitted to become. When language degrades and protections are hollowed out, dignity ceases to be shared and becomes a privilege rationed by power.
The question is no longer whether such language is legal. It is whether we will accept a politics that treats some people’s humanity as expendable, and whether we will recognize, before it spreads further, that a nation willing to bargain away dignity at the margins will eventually find it gone at the center.
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JD Vance Is Wrong: DEI Is Not What’s Dividing America—He Is
In the America that Vance envisions, people are only judged for "who they are"—unless they’re immigrants, transgender, women, Muslims, or people of color.
Dec 26, 2025
On December 21, at Turning Point USA’s annual national conference, Vice President JD Vance took to the stage to denounce the evils of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
He told the crowd:
We don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex, so we have relegated DEI to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it had belonged. In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore. And if you’re an Asian, you don’t have to talk around your skin color when you’re applying for college. Because we judge people based on who they are, not on ethnicity and things they can’t control. We don’t persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything. The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot. And if you’re that, you’re very much on our team.
For Vance, DEI and affirmative action policies are so vile that it “pisses [him] off a million times more” than racial slurs aimed at his own children by an actual white supremacist.
This is because DEI policies, in his view, are specifically designed to harm white men. On December 17, Vance posted on Twitter that, “A lot of people think ‘DEI’ is lame diversity seminars or racial slogans at NFL games. In reality, it was a deliberate program of discrimination against white men. This is an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.”
The “incredible piece” is an article by Jacob Savage entitled “The Lost Generation.” Savage argues that “DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.” A redistribution that, Savage argues, harmed “white male millennials” who saw opportunities that would have ordinarily gone to people like him go to people of color and women instead. Savage’s grievance is premised on the assumption that the people who succeed in his place were less qualified—the type of people that he would have triumphed over if not for DEI.
Much of the article is typical anti-DEI rhetoric. But, toward the end, Savage makes the following—almost insightful—point:
It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people’s IMDb pages late at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections—they took to success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.
Savage, like Vance and most anti-DEI advocates, champions “American meritocracy.” Yet, he is somehow upset and surprised that someone with “ordinary talent” failed to succeed. Isn’t this outcome exactly what true, unfettered meritocracy would produce? If everyone, regardless of race, sex, and gender, were able to compete equally, then those who are not “extraordinary” would always struggle to find financial security and success.
The actual problem that Savage is unknowingly pointing to is not DEI. It’s capitalism. Within a capitalist system that prioritizes maximizing profits over people’s well-being, and a political system that offers little to no protection for those capitalism leaves behind, most people will struggle to survive. That is by design.
Capitalism will always, by its very nature, produce “winners” and “losers.” The more people there are competing for a steadily decreasing number of jobs, the more “losers” there will be. A problem that AI—aided by the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate any regulations against it—will likely worsen in the coming years. The only real “winners” in this dynamic are the ultra-wealthy class who continue to succeed regardless of their own individual talents.
He is evoking racial animosity to distract his supporters from the real problems that capitalism is generating and that the Trump administration is ignoring.
If Vance really cared about treating people equally and with dignity, then he would concern himself with tackling the affordability crisis, increasing wages, lowering healthcare costs, building more social safety nets—all issues that the Trump administration is currently failing to address. Worse even, this administration is actively working to undermine many of the programs that would help people like Savage who are struggling to get by.
No matter what Vance says, being “a great American patriot” will never be enough to succeed within the current capitalist system. And Vance knows this. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance discusses the significance of “social capital,” or leveraging the networks of people and institutions around us to “connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information.” For Vance, his social capital, which included Yale professors, tech billionaires, and former presidential speechwriters, was critical to his success. However, that capital is reserved for the upper class. As he writes, “Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap. This is a serious problem for kids like me.”
Ultimately, Vance is not concerned with equality or discrimination. His attacks on DEI are nothing more than a smokescreen. He is evoking racial animosity to distract his supporters from the real problems that capitalism is generating and that the Trump administration is ignoring. He is hoping to exploit people’s genuine frustrations with the status quo to become president in 2028.
Vance preaches inclusivity, but his entire social and political ideology is divisive. He claims that, “We all got wrapped up over the last few years in zero sum thinking. This was because the people who think they rule the world pit us against one another.” But the reality is that Vance’s pro-capitalist, Christian nationalist, and ethnonationalist values are all zero sum ways of thinking that function precisely to divide people.
Vance says that “in the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” Yet, white people have never had to apologize for being white. This is performative anger. Vance is using the same rhetoric still used by the KKK—“Never! Never! Apologize for Being White!—to fuel hatred and contempt for his own political gain.
In the America that Vance envisions, people are only judged for “who they are”—unless they’re immigrants, transgender, women, Muslims, or people of color. Within the very same speech that Vance champions equality for all, he attacks Somali Americans. He tells the audience that “Democrats are not sending their best. Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar’s candidate for mayor of Mogadishu. Wait, I mean Minneapolis. Little Freudian slip there”—smiling as the crowd laughed along.
As one of his former friends puts it, Vance is a “chameleon. Someone who is able to change their positions and their values depending on what will amass them political power and wealth. And I think that’s really unfortunate, because it reflects a lack of integrity.” His drastic change of heart about Trump is proof of how easily he can change his colors. Vance went from Trump is “America’s Hitler” to now serving as his vice president within the span of a few years. His anti-DEI rhetoric is just another political maneuver meant to serve his own interest.
All that said, Vance is right about one thing—“The people who think they rule the world pit us against one another.” Those people include him. We can’t let him succeed.
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