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In an interview last week with reporters from the New York Times, President Trump claimed that the civil rights movement resulted in discrimination against white men. According to Trump, white men have been “very badly treated,” “not invited” to attend college, and excluded from jobs:
New York Times: So, do you believe, sir, that the civil rights protections that Americans had, starting in the 1960s and so forth, resulted ultimately in the discrimination against white men?
Trump: Well, I think that a lot of people were very badly treated. White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases. I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.
This isn’t just Trump speaking off the top of his head. The idea that white men are the primary victims of discrimination in the United States is driving administration policy.
Last month, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Chair Andrea Lucas posted on X and encouraged white men who have experienced discrimination at work to file a complaint with the agency. Lucas said she was focused on eliminating discrimination “against white male employees and applicants.”
Trump is taking a more aggressive stance on alleged discrimination against white men in his second term. In August 2018, during Trump’s first term, Darren J. Beattie was fired as a White House speech writer after it was revealed “he spoke at a white nationalist conference in 2016.”
In February 2025, Beattie was hired by the new Trump administration as the top public diplomacy official at the State Department. He was brought on a couple of months after posting that “[c]ompetent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” Beattie, mirroring Trump’s claim, argued that white men were being excluded from positions of power to protect “the feelings of women and minorities.”
America is a big place and there are undoubtedly some instances of “reverse discrimination” against white men in the country. But Trump’s claim that, as a group, white men are discriminated against in higher education and the job market is flatly false.
The myth of anti-white bias in higher education
Trump claimed that white men who “did extremely well” in high school are “not invited to go into a university or a college.” The opposite is true. Being a white man is a significant advantage when applying to colleges.
As a whole, white people are overrepresented among admitted and enrolled students, according to data analyzed by researchers from the Urban Institute and the University of Southern California. In 2024, the data shows, white people represented 40.7% of the applicants but 53% of the enrolled students. In contrast, Black applicants accounted for 8.7% of the applicant pool but just 5.8% of enrolled students. Hispanic applicants accounted for 17.4% of applicants and 17.1% of enrolled students.
Male students receive additional advantages. Most college applicants are female, so many institutions admit a higher percentage of men to ensure their student population is more evenly divided by gender. For example, in 2023, Brown University’s acceptance rate was 6.9% for male applicants and 4.2% for female applicants. That means men were “64% more likely to get into Brown” than women.
White men have an even lar