Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill argues that Democrats are reluctant to confront racism as a driving force behind Donald Trump’s political appeal, warning that this reluctance could delay urgently needed action. In a recent podcast discussion, she cautions that misplaced institutional trust and a tendency to normalize crisis hinder recognition of unraveling democratic norms, and she calls for a renewed commitment to the ideals embodied in the 14th Amendment.
In a recent episode of Slate’s Amicus podcast, host Dahlia Lithwick interviewed Sherrilyn Ifill, a prominent civil rights lawyer and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, about the need to address racism directly in understanding former President Donald Trump’s political influence. According to Slate’s account of the conversation and Ifill’s related Substack essay, “Is It Too Late,” she contends that reluctance to name racism as central to Trump’s appeal has allowed dangerous trends to persist.
In the Slate piece, Ifill points to Trump’s long record of racially charged rhetoric, including well‑documented derogatory remarks about immigrants from African nations and Haiti, and his insults directed at Somali immigrants in the United States. She argues that treating such comments as mere political noise, rather than explicit warning signs, reflects a broader indifference that blunts an effective response to rising authoritarian tendencies.
Ifill also criticizes what she describes as a powerful impulse to normalize crises. As summarized by Slate, she warns that many Americans still assume institutions will hold without fully registering the extent of democratic backsliding. “I think things are unraveling pretty fast and people will get on full alert,” she says in the podcast. “The only question is, when they get on full alert, will it be too late?”
She rejects nostalgia for earlier political eras, including the Obama administration, noting that those years were also marked by high‑profile police killings of Black people, such as Eric Garner in New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. Citing these episodes, Ifill argues that even periods often remembered as more stable or hopeful were, in fact, deeply fraught for civil rights and racial justice.
Drawing inspiration from the 14th Amendment, Ifill calls for what she describes as a “refounding” or renewed grounding of the United States in its post–Civil War constitutional commitments to equal protection and birthright citizenship. In the Slate article, she frames the current moment as a test of whether the country will fully embrace those promises or allow them to erode under political pressure.
Ifill also voices concern about the Supreme Court’s contemporary role in shaping American democracy. She notes that the Court has taken an increasingly assertive posture in recent years, including decisions that, in her view, weaken voting‑rights protections and expand executive power. Rather than focusing on a single case, she describes a broader pattern in which the Court’s conservative majority departs from the originalist and textualist methods it often claims to favor, and instead, as she sees it, adopts results‑oriented reasoning that reshapes long‑standing understandings of constitutional constraints on presidential authority.
Central to Ifill’s argument is her claim that racism functions as the “bait” or “lure” for Trump’s movement. In the Amicus conversation, she faults political leaders and commentators with large platforms who, she says, downplay the role of race when analyzing Trump’s support. “It is the lure that brought so many people into this movement,” she says, warning that failure to acknowledge how racism threads through institutions and policy debates risks enabling a broader power grab that could further undermine democratic norms.
Ifill maintains that confronting this reality openly—rather than treating race as a secondary or divisive topic—is essential if Democrats and other defenders of democratic institutions hope to mobilize effectively before, in her words, “it is too late.”
