The war against Black women is heating up.

President Donald Trump says he wants to keep the United States out of the wars raging overseas. So, he has humiliated Ukraine, catered to Russia and kowtowed to Israel, while eschewing U.S. involvement in their brutal conflicts.

Yet, Trump is waging his own homegrown wars. In addition to targeting Democrat-dominated cities, Trump and his MAGA supporters are happily targeting people of color, especially African American women. It’s a war against those who vocally oppose his racist and oppressive policies, or others who are just trying to do their jobs.

It is far more than a war of words. Trump hurled his latest volley last week, in a scurrilous attack on Yamiche Alcindor, the veteran White House correspondent for NBC News.

During a press gaggle outside the White House, Alcindor asked Trump about his recent post on Truth Social, in which he threatened to bring his “Department of War” to Chicago to fight crime.

Trump had posted an artificial intelligence-generated image of himself as Robert Duvall’s character from the 1979 film about the Vietnam War, “Apocalypse Now.” The caption read, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” along with, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The president has repeatedly excoriated Chicago and threatened to send in the National Guard.

Referring to Trump’s social media post, Alcindor asked him, “Are you trying to go to war with Chicago?”

“That’s fake news,” Trump replied.

When Alcindor tried to follow up, Trump cut her off. “Be quiet, listen! You don’t listen! You never listen,” he said. “That’s why you’re second-rate. We’re not going to war. We’re gonna clean up our cities.”

It was a “return to form” for Trump, noted Richard Prince in the“journal-isms” blog, which covers diversity in the media, and “a repeat of his clashes with Black female journalists who questioned him during his first term.”

Not only journalists. Trump and his MAGA ilk have demeaned and degraded a wide range of accomplished African American women.

Like U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, who has been attacked by Trump and his GOP posse in Congress. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump claimed that his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, “turned Black” to boost her political career. He also implied Harris traded on sexual favors to get ahead.

April Ryan, another longtime White House reporter, suffered regular verbal jabs and insults from Trump, as he publicly berated her as a “loser” and “nasty.”

And let us remember the words of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was shot to death last week at a Utah rally. His murder was heinous and unacceptable. We should reject and condemn all political violence.

Kirk, a fervent Trump ally, offered his own brand of despicable attacks on prominent Black women.

In 2023, Kirk singled out journalist Joy Reid, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, former first lady Michelle Obama and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (who died in 2024).

Kirk declared on his podcast that these women relied on affirmative action because they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” So, they “had to go steal a white person’s slot.”

Kirk’s conservative allies did not condemn those remarks.

These ugly episodes provide a false and scandalous rationale for the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion policies that, for decades, have offered Black women and men the chance to attain equity and overcome the segregation and racism that have hounded African Americans for generations. They insult and undermine hard-fought progress.

The war on Black women has been greeted with applause from Trump’s MAGA followers and silence from the rest of the Republican Party establishment. It has become permissible, even popular for some, to dehumanize us.

For example, African Americans are the victims of what academic study has called “trickle-down racism.”

Researchers Ashley Jardina and Spencer Piston examined beliefs and attitudes before and after the 2016 presidential election, when Trump first came to power.

Their examination of polling research found that “Trump supporters expressed more racially dehumanizing beliefs toward Black people after the 2016 presidential election,” the researchers wrote in the study, published in 2023 in the journal Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology.

Poll “respondents are asked to rate ‘how evolved’ they believe Black people are on a 0 to 100 scale accompanying an image of the iconic ‘ascent of man’ depicting a popular (and incorrect) perception of the evolution of humans,” the researchers wrote.

“The image features five silhouettes arranged on a scale beginning with an ape-like figure and ending with a modern human.”

The study found that “Trump support was associated with an increase in whites’ endorsement of dehumanizing portrayals of Black people after Trump’s electoral victory.”

The authors added: “Trump supporters became, on average, more willing to report dehumanizing attitudes about Black people.”

They would take Black women back to the days of Aunt Jemima, Jezebel and the “Welfare Queen.” We are not going back.

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Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist.

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