The Biden administration recently announced plans to correct a disparity in the distribution of subsidies for American farmers by writing checks for black farmers who've been left behind for decades and particularly by the Trump regime.
When those plans were announced, I did not necessarily foresee that someone or some group would challenge the legality of such a bailout, but former members of the Trump regime are doing exactly that,
It's reverse racism, they say.
Trump's allies argue that the same criteria long used to discriminate against farmers of color — race and ethnicity — can't be used to make them exclusively eligible for federal programs.
Whites have civil rights, too, they say in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Texas. [...]
"This is a landmark civil rights case," Stephen Miller, head of America First Legal and Trump's White House senior policy adviser, said in a statement Thursday. "The stakes in this case could not be higher: The government must not be allowed to use its awesome authorities to punish, harm, exclude, prefer, reward or damage its citizens based upon their race or ethnicity."
Usually, when someone calls their case a "landmark civil rights case," they aren't referring to the plight of white people.
It may not be immediately obvious why Trump's inner circle wants to make a case of this, but very recent history, Trump's trade war and his own farm bailouts tell us why they view this as their case.
The Trump regime distributed tens of billions of dollars in additional farm subsidies between 2018 and 2020 to compensate for the fallout of Trump's trade war and his failed non-response to the coronavirus pandemic. But Trump's bailouts weren't distributed evenly. Nearly 100 percent of his bailouts went to white farmers.
The Biden's administrations plans are a response to decades of disparity, but it's also a response to the very recent history of the Trump regime. That's why Trump's inner circle filed this case; their boss put them up to it because he sees checks for black farmers as a repudiation of his own time in office. He doesn't want to go down in history as a racist president even though he absolutely was.