Francis Wilkinson: Civil rights are on the ballot this election

Civil rights — who gets to have them and who doesn’t — have been a central contest of American politics from the start. But at no time in recent history have so many Americans had their rights on the line in one election.

In the wake of Republican Supreme Court justices overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, tens of millions of American women in red states lost their reproductive rights. Tens of millions more stand to lose them if Republicans win Congress and MAGA seizes the presidency, enabling them to impose national restrictions or an outright abortion ban.

At the same time, transgender Americans have been under persistent assault. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, about 2% of adults under age 30 say they are trans men or trans women (3% say they are nonbinary). The percentage of the population that is transgender declines with age. Among those 50 or older, only 0.3% say they are transgender or nonbinary.

Despite these tiny percentages, transgender Americans are a recurring feature of Republican campaigns. An astonishing 41% of Donald Trump’s campaign ads over the past two weeks mention gender identity or transgender rights, according to Wesleyan Media Project. Legislation to ban gender reassignment surgeries, bar transgender students from athletics, and impose policies designed to humiliate and marginalize transgender people — intentionally misgendering them, for example — have become common GOP commitments.

Immigrants, of course, will face their own existential crisis if Trump is elected president. Trump has promised a national dragnet to round up undocumented immigrants, including millions who are long settled with American spouses or children, and place them in camps before deporting them. Given that U.S. citizens have no national identification card, many Americans will likely be caught in the blitzkrieg, having their rights annihilated based on rumors or because someone determines they have a foreign “look.”

Remarkably, all these assaults on civil rights, affecting tens of millions, are baked into GOP rule even if Trump fails to refashion the presidency into an authoritarian weapon. Yet that is undoubtedly Trump’s goal, as many of his former staff and cabinet officials have made clear. No other president has been credibly called a “fascist,” least of all by his own appointees.

Trump’s authoritarian threat engenders an entirely different magnitude of peril. In addition to women, immigrants and transgender Americans, political opponents face a likely assault on their civil rights in a Trump presidency. A National Public Radio report this month found that Trump has made “more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents.” The threats are not hypothetical. An analysis by Just Security found that Trump, while president, pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his perceived enemies on at least a dozen occasions.

“Donald Trump has made no secret of his disregard for the rule of law and his intent to corrupt the immense powers of the federal government to target his opponents and break the institutions that could pose checks and balances to presidential power,” Mike Zamore, the American Civil Liberties Union’s national director of policy and government affairs, said in a statement. “In a second term, unleashed and feeling invulnerable from legal and political repercussions, he would pose an unprecedented challenge to our constitutional values.”

There is no other time in modern American history when an authoritarian threat to the civil rights of so many was so clearly on an election ballot.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in July of that year as his campaign for reelection was intensifying. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona won the 1964 GOP nomination for president after having voted against the Civil Rights Act. Goldwater’s campaign rode a wave of White Christian conservative paranoia about liberated Black Americans, White liberals, and communism.

Goldwater, for all his libertarian kookiness, was a politician of principle and restraint, unlike Trump. Yet Goldwater’s coalition, which included hardcore racists, far right conspiracists, and other elements of the right-wing fringe, gained power over decades and eventually came to dominate the GOP under MAGA. That coalition lost the 1964 election in a landslide. In 2024, its political progeny threatens the liberty of millions.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.

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