Time for Reparations
The Case Trump Never Meant to Make, but did.
Trump is at it again. Flooding the zone with chaos. Creating spectacle. Pushing legal boundaries until they become almost unrecognizable.
This time it came through a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS that ultimately resulted in settlement and an agreement establishing a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” intended to compensate individuals who claim they were harmed by government actions. Yes, a tax payer funded slush fund, that he gets to oversee and disburse! This could be the biggest grift yet.
Watch it here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=saved&v=1976634936277105
Like much of Trump’s public life, this follows a pattern that observers of his legal history have recognized for decades. Trump has been involved in thousands of lawsuits over the course of his business and political career, far more than many comparable real estate developers and business figures. Legal historians and journalists have repeatedly noted that for Trump, litigation often functions not simply as a mechanism for winning in court, but as a mechanism for shaping narratives, applying pressure, generating leverage, and controlling public attention.
The strategy does not necessarily require a courtroom victory because the lawsuit itself often becomes part of the objective.
Make a claim large enough to dominate headlines.
Push legal boundaries beyond where most people would normally push them.
Force opponents into expensive and exhausting responses.
Generate publicity while reframing yourself as either aggressor or victim, depending on what serves the moment.
And if a settlement emerges somewhere down the road, the story can still be presented as validation.
Because for Trump, the legal arena has often functioned not as a place to determine facts, but as another stage upon which political and cultural narratives can be performed. Critics and legal observers have repeatedly argued that the process itself frequently becomes the product.
Which is what makes this latest episode so revealing.
Because buried inside the spectacle, buried beneath the outrage and legal maneuvering, Trump may have accidentally articulated something much larger than he intended.
Of course everyone is outraged, of course this is an egregious fleasing of the American tax payer - but I want us to look just beyond that and pay close attention to the justification Trump just gave regarding this fund:
Listen to him make the case: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Cry5JVLLa/
A: “It is reimbursements for people who have been harmed by the Government… They’ve paid legal fees, gone bankrupt, their lives have been destroyed and they turned out to be right. It was a terrible period of time in the history of our country. People were treated terrible and brutalized by their government and we’re going to reimburse them.” - Donald J. Trump
You see it right?
In that single statement, Trump may have unintentionally done something remarkable. He has publicly articulated the very moral architecture that advocates of reparations have been attempting to explain for generations.
Think carefully about the logic being offered.
Government actions caused harm. The harm was not simply a matter of hurt feelings or abstract grievances. Lives were disrupted. Careers were damaged. People paid legal fees. People lost businesses. Families suffered economic consequences. Material damage followed governmental action. And because material damage occurred, material repair is justified.
That is the argument.
Strip away the personalities, remove the partisan labels, and set aside the outrage for a moment, and what remains is a principle that suddenly feels very familiar.
Government caused harm.
The harm had long-term consequences.
Those consequences created measurable disadvantages that extended beyond a single moment.
Repair should include compensation.
That is not some foreign idea imported from activists or academics. That is not radical theory. That is reparations!
Something America has spent generations describing as “unreasonable” has just been fed to the American people as necessary (at their expense).
So, thinking outloud here, perhaps the issue was never really whether reparations made sense, perhaps the issue has always been whose suffering qualified for our concern.
America Never Opposed Reparations
There is a story America tells itself, and like many stories nations tell about themselves, it survives largely because we repeat it often enough that it begins to feel true.
The story goes something like this: America believes in individual responsibility, not collective guilt. America does not compensate historical grievances. America cannot be expected to endlessly revisit the wounds of the past. America simply moves forward.
But history has a habit of interrupting our mythology.
Because the truth is that America has never actually opposed reparations.
America has opposed certain forms of reparations. More specifically, America has opposed reparations when they require a deep and uncomfortable confrontation with race, power, and the unfinished consequences of slavery.
We have compensated harmed populations repeatedly throughout our history.
Following the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the federal government eventually acknowledged that profound harm had occurred and passed compensation through the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Individuals wrongfully imprisoned have received settlements. Native communities have received compensation for broken treaties and stolen lands, though often incompletely and inadequately, and after a long history of broken promises.
Nevertheless, government settlements occur constantly. Historically we do not question the legitimacy of restitution itself.
We already understand the principle.
When government action causes injury, repair becomes part of justice.
We know this. We practice this. We institutionalize this.
Yet something changes when the conversation turns toward slavery and its long shadow. Suddenly the questions emerge.
“How would we pay for it?”
“How could we possibly calculate damages?”
“Nobody alive today owned slaves.”
“Why should people now bear responsibility for things that happened then?”
Notice what happens in that moment.
The principle itself does not suddenly disappear. Rather, the principle encounters a story so large and so morally disruptive that we begin searching for exits.
Because slavery was not simply an event.
It was not a tragic chapter that ended with a constitutional amendment and then faded into history.
Slavery was an economic engine. It was a wealth-building system. It was a labor extraction machine operating at a scale almost difficult to comprehend. And like every major economic system, its effects did not simply evaporate once the legal structures changed.
The story did not end in 1865.
The laws changed. The conditions did not.
Freedom arrived. Resources largely did not.
The Promise That Was Given and Then Taken Away
When formerly enslaved people emerged from the wreckage of slavery, they understood something intuitively that economists and historians now recognize as almost self-evident.
Freedom without resources is incomplete freedom.
Freedom on paper is not the same thing as freedom in practice.
You can declare someone free and still leave them without land, without money, without tools, without education, without institutional support, and without access to systems of opportunity.
You can legally remove chains while preserving conditions that continue to limit movement.
Formerly enslaved people understood this immediately. They did not simply ask for abstract liberty. They asked for the means to build a life.
For a brief moment, it appeared that America might actually understand this too.
In 1865, Special Field Orders No. 15, issued by William Tecumseh Sherman, designated large portions of confiscated Southern land for formerly enslaved families. Along the southeastern coast, thousands of Black families settled and began constructing new lives. Communities formed. Farms were planted. People believed that perhaps America intended to make emancipation something more than symbolic.
Imagine beginning to think that the nation that had stolen labor, bodies, families, and futures had finally decided to repair some small part of what had been taken.
Then power changed hands.
Following Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson moved quickly to restore property rights to former Confederates. Land that had been designated for formerly enslaved families was returned to many of the very people who had previously claimed ownership over them. The Freedmen’s Bureau, which had initially supported land redistribution, was gradually pushed away from that mission and toward enforcing labor contracts instead.
Think carefully about what happened there.
The nation did not simply fail to provide reparations. The nation interrupted them.
The promise was extended. The promise was withdrawn.
And what followed was not merely disappointment.
It was the loss of an economic foundation that would shape generations.
Because wealth compounds.
Land becomes inheritance.
Inheritance becomes educational opportunity.
Educational opportunity becomes investment.
Investment becomes security.
Security becomes influence.
Influence becomes power.
This was never simply a story of people “starting at zero.”
Starting at zero would almost sound fair by comparison.
Many people were prevented from starting at all.
The Real Debate
So perhaps Trump accidentally revealed something larger than he intended.
You see, the debate has never really been whether taxpayer money can be used to repair harms created by government action.
Apparently we accept that possibility.
The debate has never been whether historical wrongdoing creates measurable consequences that continue beyond the original event.
Apparently we understand that too.
The debate has never been whether government carries responsibility when its actions destroy lives.
Apparently we believe that as well.
The real debate has always been more difficult because it requires us to examine ourselves rather than merely our policies.
The question beneath all the arguments and talking points has always been this:
Whose suffering counts?
Whose losses become visible?
Whose wounds become politically actionable?
And whose pain becomes absorbed into the landscape of history until we no longer notice it at all?
Because some suffering is treated as a national emergency. Other suffering is treated as an unfortunate footnote.
And perhaps the deepest question of all is whether justice is truly justice if it only remembers the wounds we are comfortable acknowledging.
A Final Note: What Does Any of This Have to Do with New Thought and Liberation Consciousness?
At this point some readers may be asking a reasonable question:
What does any of this have to do with New Thought / progressive spirituality or inner consciousness work? Why move from tax policy and reparations into spirituality and consciousness?
At the heart of my work and my spiritual orientation is one basic premise: consciousness creates conditions.
Now before some readers tense up at that statement, let me clarify what I do not mean. I do not mean that individuals simply “thought” slavery into existence. I do not mean people suffering injustice somehow manifested their own oppression. That has been one of the most dangerous distortions of New Thought spirituality—a kind of spiritual bypass that turns systems into personal failures and injustice into individual consciousness problems.
Liberation consciousness asks us to go deeper.
If consciousness creates conditions, then collective consciousness creates collective conditions.
Nations carry consciousness. Cultures carry consciousness. Institutions carry consciousness. Stories carry consciousness.
Entire societies organize themselves around shared assumptions about who belongs, who matters, who deserves protection, who deserves opportunity, and whose suffering remains invisible.
For centuries America operated within a consciousness of hierarchy and separation. It created stories of racial difference and superiority. It built myths around deservingness and worthiness. Those ideas eventually became policies, laws, institutions, neighborhoods, school systems, lending practices, and economic structures.
What began as consciousness became culture. What became culture became systems. What became systems became lived reality.
Now, if consciousness can create conditions, consciousness can also transform them.
That is where liberation enters.
Because liberation spirituality is not simply interested in helping people think more positively while remaining trapped inside harmful systems. Liberation consciousness asks a more demanding question:
What would it mean to become conscious enough to interrupt the patterns we inherited?
This is why telling the truth matters. This is why history matters. This is why repair matters.
Because healing requires more than declaring wholeness while refusing to examine brokenness.
Ernest Holmes taught that there is a Power for good in the universe greater than we are and that we can use it. But using that power requires seeing clearly. Spiritual practice was never meant to become a tool for denial. It was meant to become a tool for awakening.
We cannot transform what we refuse to face.
James Baldwin once observed:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
That is not merely social commentary.
That is spiritual practice. That is affirmative prayer at the level of culture itself.
The deeper work I’m exploring is asking what kind of consciousness could finally tell the truth about itself, and then love humanity enough to repair what it discovers.
Because liberation is not merely freedom from chains.
Liberation is freedom from the consciousness that keeps recreating them.
“When this nation can create billion dollar funds for political allies and supporters, but still will not address reparations for the descendants of slaves, that is not incapacity. That is choice.
America is capable of repair. It has yet to choose justice.”
- Bernice King
Reflection Questions
When you hear the word reparations, what emotions arise immediately? Curiosity? Resistance? Anger? Compassion? Fear? Defensiveness? Why do you think those particular reactions emerge?
If government compensation is appropriate for some forms of harm, what criteria determine whose suffering qualifies?
How do we distinguish between individual guilt and collective responsibility?
What does justice require beyond simply ending a harmful system?
Is freedom complete if people are legally free but materially prevented from participating fully in society?
What inherited advantages or disadvantages shape our lives that we rarely notice?
James Baldwin wrote:
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us.”
Where do you see history still living in our communities, neighborhoods, schools, wealth structures, or institutions?
What would repair look like if we thought about it spiritually rather than only politically?
What fears emerge when we imagine a society that fully tells the truth about itself?
In your own life, where have you experienced the difference between forgiveness and repair?
Resources
Rev. Dr. David Alexander D.D., is a public theologian and spiritual writer exploring the intersection of spirituality, justice, and moral imagination in public life. Bringing 20 plus years of pulpit ministry with Centers for Spiritual Living, into everyday life and the call for a better world. He is the author of Freedom from Discord: The Promise of New Thought Liberation Theology and the visionary behind Recovery from the Lie of Whiteness. David also writes the monthly column Philosophy in Action for Science of Mind magazine. Visit www.revdavidalexander.com to learn more.
This is my full time work and primary source of income. Thank you for sharing your good with me. Together, we can demonstrate that abundance is the nature of reality.