Trump & the KKK Act: Carol Anderson on Reconstruction-Era Voting Rights Law Cited in Trump Indictment
On Thursday, former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to trying to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss. Trump appeared before a magistrate judge in Washington’s federal courthouse two days after he was indicted. A key part of the election interference charges Trump faces relates to a Civil War-era rights law that protects the right of citizens to have their vote counted. We speak with Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, about Trump’s attempt to wipe out the votes of Americans of color and the intimidation of Black voters and election workers. “This is the kind of terror that is reminiscent of what happened during Reconstruction that led to the KKK Act that Trump is charged with,” says Anderson. “That kind of terror was the intimidation of Black people who were exercising the right to vote.”