“Reparations” is the term that Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., used on Friday to describe the taxpayer-backed settlement fund of more than $1.7 billion that President Donald Trump wants to use to pay people he and his allies perversely claim have been wronged by the federal government.
The administration has refused to preclude Jan. 6 rioters and other extremists who stormed the Capitol in 2021 from potentially qualifying for money from the fund. That means, thanks to Trump, people who waged a deadly and fundamentally racist effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss could end up raking in piles of tax dollars. Meanwhile, his war against Iran has devastated the U.S. economy and Americans’ wallets with it. A bunch of right-wing activists already have their hands out.
Even some members of the typically obsequious Republican Party seem unnerved by the prospect of the fund.
But not Meuser, who told pro-Trump outlet Newsmax that the fund is about “reparations” for people supposedly wronged under former President Joe Biden’s administration.
The phrasing lends credence to the perception that Trump’s taxpayer-backed fund of more than $1 billion for people purportedly wronged by the government is actually just a Trojan horse to funnel “reparations” to white criminals.
The word “reparations” is technically race-neutral, but it’s undeniably racialized in the American sociopolitical context, where it typically refers to remedies for racist wrongs: the mass incarceration of Japanese people, for example, or the racist subjugation of Black people under chattel slavery and in the years after. Conservatives have demonstrated they understand the word’s meaning well enough in their broad opposition to any consideration of reparations for Black people.
More recently, some conservatives have portrayed Trump and Jan. 6 rioters (all individuals who could potentially make a claim for money from the proposed fund if it’s authorized) as people who’ve endured racist mistreatment. In 2021, then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., claimed without evidence that some jailed Jan. 6 rioters were being forced to undergo “critical race theory training,” that they had been mistreated in jail “because of their skin color” and that these unfounded allegations amounted to a “two-tiered justice system.” Over the past few years, Trump himself has accused a number of Black prosecutors of racism for investigating him for wrongdoings. And in 2024, North Carolina political candidate Dan Bishop, an election denier whom Trump tapped as a U.S. attorney in North Carolina last year, said Trump had as much difficulty getting fair treatment in his criminal fraud trial in New York as a Black person living in the segregated South in the 1950s.
Are these claims true? No.
Do they sound plausible enough to secure potential payouts from a “reparations” fund being led by an administration intent on portraying some white people, including the president, as if they’re the biggest victims in American society today? Absolutely.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.