When Donald Trump signed his Executive Order on Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy on 23 April 2025, the language was familiar enough to anyone who’s followed the legal rollback of civil rights in the United States over the past two decades. The order, dense with invocations of the American Dream and the Constitution, claims to reaffirm “equality under the law.” What it actually does is abolish one of the few remaining legal tools for confronting systemic racism: disparate-impact liability.
Disparate-impact law does not require proving intent to discriminate. It recognises that structural inequalities can persist even under facially neutral policies. When job applications are filtered through educational qualifications inaccessible to many working-class people, or when housing loans are denied at higher rates to Black applicants despite identical financial profiles. Since the 1970s, the courts and the federal government have understood that these patterns are not accidental. Trump’s new order declares such reasoning unconstitutional.
This is not just legal formalism. It’s the legal wing of a class and racial counter-revolution, one that casts structural redress as “discrimination” and meritocracy as colourblind common sense. By revoking key parts of Title VI and instructing the Justice Department to deprioritise enforcement of anti-discrimination laws that rely on disparate-impact theory, the order rewrites the rules of engagement between the state and its marginalised citizens.
And it doesn’t stop there. Federal agencies are now tasked with reviewing and potentially dismantling all consent decrees and settlements that involve disparate impact. State laws upholding such doctrines may face federal pre-emption. The order even invites legal reinterpretation of long-standing civil rights laws, such as Title VII and the Fair Housing Act, whose meanings are now to be re-centred around intent, not outcome.
In effect, the Trump administration has declared systemic inequality legal, so long as no one admits to it.
Blueprint
It would be tempting to see the April 23rd Executive Order as simply another salvo in Trump’s long war on civil rights, a reprise of the attacks on Critical Race Theory, DEI initiatives, and Section 230 that marked his first administration. But this one is different in scope and intent. It is best understood as part of Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint being quietly implemented across the federal apparatus by Trump’s second-term ideologues.
Project 2025, prepared by the Heritage Foundation and embraced by key figures in the Trumpist vanguard, is not a policy document so much as a strategy for total state capture: the transformation of the federal bureaucracy into a mechanism for executing right-wing political aims. Its plan includes purging civil servants, centralising power in the Oval Office, dismantling regulatory protections, and, crucially, redefining civil rights through the lens of reactionary individualism.
The April 23rd order delivers precisely that. It completes a jurisprudential circle begun by the Roberts Court in Parents Involved v. Seattle (2007), where Chief Justice Roberts infamously wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” That phrase now appears verbatim in Trump’s order, as a kind of motto for the new civil rights rollback. A move from anti-discrimination to anti-anti-discrimination, where efforts to rectify historical injustice are rebranded as violations of ‘equality’.
This reframing enables a broader fascist turn in American governance, in which authoritarian power is exercised not through open violence (though that remains always available) but through the depoliticisation of justice, the atomisation of the citizen, and the stripping away of collective protections under the guise of fairness. If liberal equality asked whether opportunities were truly available to all, the Trumpist version asserts they already are, and that any attempt to prove otherwise is itself a kind of grievance politics. A crime against merit.
As the state reorients toward a punitive, revanchist form of governance, civil rights law becomes a battlefield for class war by other means. When protections against racialised housing discrimination are scrapped, it is not the white billionaire denied a mortgage. When educational “merit” is enforced through test scores and ‘cultural fit’, it is working-class Black and Latino students who disappear from elite institutions. The ideal citizen of this regime is someone who needs no help, makes no complaint, and exists as a fully responsible economic unit, a perfect subject of market authoritarianism.
Precedent
There is a precedent for this kind of manoeuvre: Chile under Pinochet. After the 1973 coup, the junta. Backed by the Chicago Boys and their economic advisors. Did not simply suspend democratic governance through force; it rewrote the legal order in the name of “freedom.” Discrimination was outlawed not to protect the marginalised but to eliminate collective rights altogether, ensuring that the market, not the state, would be the sole arbiter of social worth. Trade unions were crushed not only by violence but through legal disempowerment; public education and pensions were privatised through constitutional mechanisms; and the language of neutrality became the tool of a brutal economic order. It was authoritarian neoliberalism in its purest form, where repression and market rule operated hand in glove.
Trump’s Executive Order on disparate impact channels this same logic: neoliberal legality as counter-revolution. It is not a break from the American constitutional tradition so much as its perverse consummation. The culmination of decades of jurisprudence that emptied equal protection of its material content. Where Pinochet used the constitution to entrench inequality behind a veil of neutrality, Trump uses civil rights law to erase civil rights altogether. The goal is not merely to repress dissent or roll back past reforms, but to make the claim to justice itself illegible in legal terms. If no discrimination can be proven unless confessed, then power never has to answer to history.
As with Pinochet’s Chile, the terrain of struggle now shifts. It is no longer enough to defend existing rights; those rights are being redefined out of existence. The work ahead is not merely to resist fascism, but to reconstruct the very meaning of equality in an age when its language is used against it.
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