Trump nominees already worry civil rights groups

The nation’s largest civil rights organisation says it will closely monitor President-elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration’s policies and actions to ensure that hard-fought civil rights gains are not lost without a protracted fight, reports the Associated Press. Seven of the nation’s largest civil rights organisations - the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the National Action Network - also criticised the appointment of conservative media executive Stephen Bannon as Trump’s senior counsellor. The selection of Bannon, a favourite of the ultra-right and white nationalist movement, concerned many of the groups, which said they would be prepared to organise and mobilise if necessary. With black and Hispanic voters, Trump apparently did as well as Republican Mitt Romney when Romney lost to President Barack Obama in 2012, according to exit polls. Trump appeared to have won more than half of white voters, who made up 70% of the electorate. The groups said they would wait to see Trump’s actual policies dealing with the inner cities, which the president-elect said he would focus on. There are some areas in which they can work with the Trump administration, but “these seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule,” Henderson said. Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund, Inc, and Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said they would continue to work on voting rights issues under the Trump administration, given they fielded thousands of voting rights complaints - 30,000 on Election Day alone, according to Clarke - during last week’s elections. Fourteen states had new voting or registration restrictions in place for the 2016 presidential election, raising concerns that minority voters in particular would have a harder time accessing the ballot box.