Trump Just Helped Make the Case for Reparations for Black People
On May 18, 2026, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, who now runs the United States Department of Justice, announced a $1.7 billion settlement with President Trump, drawn from public coffers, after the IRS disclosed his tax returns during his 2016 presidential campaign. The president wasted no time declaring how he would deploy this self-dealt windfall: as reparations for the January 6 rioters. For those of us who have spent decades arguing that the federal government owes a debt to the descendants of enslaved Africans, the president’s declaration was something we have never quite seen before — an accidental confession. The question of reparations was never one of appropriateness or capacity but one of political will. America’s most unlikely reparations advocate has, at last, revealed the truth.
Let us be precise about what just happened. The president publicly identified a class of people harmed by government action. He named a dollar figure equal to that harm and announced his intention to compensate them directly. He referred to this process as “reparations.” A blueprint for collective repair—harm, acknowledgment, compensation, and direct payment—is now federal policy.
The math alone is of interest. Using the very formula embedded in the DOJ’s Anti-Weaponization Fund — roughly $21,250 per person per year since the harm occurred — and applying it to 161 years since the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, each descendant of enslaved Africans would be owed approximately $3.4 million. Of course, the experience of lifelong, generational enslavement doesn’t exist in the same universe as an arrest for rioting. However, the 1,600 January 6 rioters, who have already been pardoned, are set to receive $1.06 million each. The 40 million descendants of American slavery have received nothing. What do you think they deserve?
The arithmetic reveals facts about this nation’s conscience that are not complicated; in fact, they are part of a pattern with a long line of precedent. When the District of Columbia abolished slavery in 1862, Congress did not pay the formerly enslaved. It paid the slaveholders — compensating them for their “lost property.” The first check written in the name of emancipation went to the people who held human beings in chains. Now, in 2026, the first presidential invocation of reparations flows toward those who stormed the Capitol, many of them in Confederate regalia, before the descendants of those the Confederacy sought to keep enslaved have received a dollar. History, as they say, does not repeat itself. It rhymes.
The United States government has paid reparations to those truly harmed in the past. Japanese Americans received them under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Holocaust survivors received U.S.-backed restitution under Military Law No. 59 in 1947. The machinery of compensatory justice exists and has been deployed, now in many different contexts. The only group for whom this machinery has been systematically and deliberately withheld is the group whose stolen labor built the treasury from which all these other payments flow.
To be sure, the January 6 rioters must have their cases adjudicated fairly, not biased by the political orientation of whoever is in office. If any were indeed wronged in some way (which I’m not familiar with), we do not contest the principle of redress for government wrongdoing. In fact, we welcome it. And we insist on that principle — and demand it be applied with equal force to those whose suffering is exponentially greater, exponentially older, and exponentially more documented.
But in a single press release, the 47th president of the United States confirmed what reparations scholars have always known: the government can identify harm. The government can name a dollar amount. The government can write a check. The capacity has never been the question. The will has been.
Donald Trump, a reparations advocate. The ancestors would have laughed. Then they would have gotten to work.
Justin Hansford is a law professor at Howard University School of Law, Executive Director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, the co-founder of the African American Redress Network, and the founder and executive director of the Charles Ogletree Reparative Justice Bar Association. Adom Cooper is a national security and foreign policy professional, lawyer and writer. He is a member of Black Professionals in International and a Term Member at The Council on Foreign Relations.
