.png)
Trump's 2025 seeks to reverse LBJ's 1965
President Trump has embarked on a systematic effort to unravel Lyndon B. Johnson's civil rights legacy, rolling back protections that have shaped American life for nearly six decades.
Why it matters: Backlash to the racial justice movement of 2020 has overshadowed a more fundamental, long-standing conservative goal: Turning back the clock on the sweeping societal changes of 1965.
The Trump administration's aggressive push to reverse LBJ's signature achievements could radically alter how communities of color confront discrimination in a diversifying America.
"This is not as much about dismantling the policies of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden," Mark K. Updegrove, the LBJ Foundation's president and CEO, tells Axios. "It's dismantling the Great Society."
The big picture: Two months into his term, Trump already has overturned, weakened or targeted LBJ policies on voting rights, desegregation, the environment, immigration, education, affirmative action and health care.
Within hours of taking office, Trump revoked LBJ's 1965 executive order mandating "equal opportunity" for people of color and women in the recruitment, hiring and training of federal contractors.
Trump's new order triggered sweeping changes to anti-discrimination rules — including a little-noticed memo stating that the federal government no longer would unequivocally prohibit contractors from operating "segregated facilities."
Flashback: The Texas-born LBJ won the 1964 election in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history, with comfortable Democratic majorities in the House and Senate less than a year after President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
1965 marked "the high tide of the Great Society," Updegrove told Axios, referring to Johnson's vast domestic agenda aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice.
"If you look at just the laws in that year alone, it's breathtaking."
1965: Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act after the attack on unarmed peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Ala. He had encouraged the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to march for voting rights to sway the public.
2025: Republicans in Congress have blocked attempts to reauthorize elements of the Voting Rights Act, while Trump has pushed for national voting restrictions as part of his false claims of rampant election fraud.
1965: Johnson signed the Higher Education Act, creating scholarships and low-interest loans for Black, Latino, Native American and low-income white students.
2025: Trump is seeking to eliminate the Department of Education and has waged war on universities, slashing federal funding and launching investigations into 45 colleges over their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices. The crackdown has endangered Black and Latino student groups founded during LBJ's era.
1965: LBJ signed legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid, two pillars of the U.S. social safety net.
2025: Trump has promised not to cut either program, but House Republicans are eyeing major changes to Medicaid to pay for roughly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
1965: LBJ signed a bill abolishing the racist national origins quota system for immigration.
2025: Trump is considering a travel ban on as many as 43 countries, expanding restrictions he imposed in his first term as he cracks down on both legal and illegal immigration.
Zoom out: Johnson's Great Society has always been opposed by small-government conservatives, who argued that its programs went too far in expanding the federal bureaucracy and executive authority.
Some conservatives argued that racial integration was anti-Christian and claimed it infringed on religious freedom.
Others have rejected the argument that scrapping DEI policies amounts to a reversal of anti-segregation laws, or that "election integrity laws" suppress the voting rights of communities of color.
Between the lines: Guiding the Trump Justice Department's policies is a broad reinterpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on "anti-white racism" rather than discrimination against people of color.
The Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" outlined how Trump could reverse some of LBJ's initiatives, including his order ensuring equal opportunity in federal contracting.
The administration also has flagged hundreds of words about race and discrimination that agencies should limit or avoid using as part of its DEI purge, according to The New York Times.
Among the purged words: racism, segregation, discrimination, Black, Native American, discrimination and women.
What they're saying White House spokesman Kush Desai tells Axios that Trump is fulfilling the promises he made during the campaign.
The president's mandate was "to streamline our bloated government, implement commonsense policies, enforce our immigration laws, and restore the primacy of merit over racist DEI policies so that every American can live up to his or her potential."
(c) 2025, Axios