George Floyd’s 2020 murder promised a ‘racial reckoning.’ Instead, we got Trump

Five years ago this Sunday came the nine minutes and 29 seconds that changed the world.

Or so it seemed at the time.

On May 25, 2020, and for weeks after, the viral video of white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by pressing his knee into the neck of the unarmed and gasping Black man for those agonizing minutes triggered the largest protest movement in American history.

It’s estimated that at least 15 million Americans, and maybe 26 million or more, chanted “Black lives matter!” and marched through the streets, not just in the usual places like D.C. or Philly but in small rural towns like Parachute, Colo., population 1,100. A future GOP presidential candidate sponsored Senate legislation to rein in rogue cops. Fortune 500 companies tripped over each other to tweet first, and most forcefully, about their commitment to an American future of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

They called it a “racial reckoning,” but no one in that unforgettable spring of 2020 reckoned on how this would all play out.

Donald Trump, who was the 45th president then and is 47th president today, offered what amounted to his George Floyd fifth anniversary message a few days early, during a rare trip to the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.

“The days of woke are over, Trump told reporters in a heated answer to a question, adding later: ”The days of that crap are over in this country. We’re going to have law and order.” It seemed beyond fitting that Trump was responding to a bizzaro-world version of George Floyd — a Black woman, New Jersey’s Rep. LaMonica McIver, facing federal felony charges because she touched an ICE agent during a chaotic scrum outside a Newark detention center.

The Trump regime’s trumped-up criminal charges against McIver seemed symbolic of a backlash that was epitomized by — yet hardly limited to — the next day’s announcement by its Justice Department that it’s undoing a police-accountability agreement with Minneapolis that was reached in the era after George Floyd’s murder.

Also tossed into the trash was Justice’s reform agreement with Louisville, after cops there shot and killed an unarmed, sleeping Breonna Taylor during a botched 2020 drug raid.

The assistant attorney general who announced the end of any federal interest in curbing police brutality, Harmeet Dhillon, apparently thinks those resources are better spent on a “patterns and practices” federal probe into Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson after he took the altar in an African American church and had the audacity to laud his city’s hiring of Black officials.

But it’s not just the nation’s capital in a DeLorean race back to the future of the 1950s, if not the 1850s. Sometimes it means literally going back, like the Louisiana school district that successfully petitioned for an end to a 1966 desegregation order. The names of Confederate generals are going back on elementary schools and military bases. Pittsburgh just ditched its first Black mayor for a race-baiting opponent who falsely claimed that crime was rising there.

The corporations that once raced to brag about their commitment to diversity are today pounding the delete button faster than an internet cat, desperate to disappear any reference to DEI before the regime calls them out.

Nationwide, police officers are killing more civilians now than they did in 2020, the year of the protest marches. The D.C. street near the White House where city leaders painted “Black Lives Matter” in 2020 has been torn up under pressure from Republicans, its letters permanently erased.

On the fifth anniversary of his murder, George Floyd must be spinning in his grave. Roughly two months of hope that the indelible image of a horrific and senseless police murder would finally spark an honest conversation around structural racism in America and end a repressive, warrior-cop model of policing, has faded into four years of relentless backlash.

The surge of public support for Black Lives Matter proved as ephemeral as a May wind — boosted by millions seeking an emotional release amid months of COVID lockdown, but not the hard work of a permanent social movement.

But the images of their high school kids or next-door neighbors in the streets of towns like Mount Vernon, Ohio, or Chambersburg, Pa., demanding racial justice clearly terrified a big swath of white America. When the echoes of protest faded, an army of reactionaries went to work.

A Fox News endless tape loop of cherrypicked flashes of arson or looting in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder inspired so-called thought leaders on the right to misuse scary-sounding terms like “critical race theory” to pump up a moral panic about the alleged school indoctrination of young people. These false prophets rebranded their desire to preserve white privilege as a war against “wokeism.” For many voters, the backlash offered a rationale to return Trump — despite a largely failed first term and a 34-count felony conviction — to the White House to crush what was unleashed on May 25, 2020.

“The raising of consciousness that came about from the George Floyd movement, and the immense — not only national but international — protest ... some of the reason of consciousness from that still remains, but it lacks the sort of muscle that it had back then and for a variety of reasons," Jason Williams, an associate professor of justice studies at Montclair State University who researches the Black Lives Matter movement, told me. He said the movement is fairly “dormant” now — discouraged and to some extent silenced by Trump’s victory.

That’s true, but there’s also a powerful argument that an “anti-woke” Republican won in November 2024 because of the post-Floyd backlash.

In the spring of 2021, I spent a week in Knox County, Ohio, which voted 70% for Trump in 2020 and surrounds the ultra-liberal campus of Kenyon College. The county seat, Mount Vernon, had been roiled the year before when 700 people — including many students and teachers from the local high school — staged a Black Lives Matter march.

Some of the shocked pro-Trump locals I later interviewed said they watched the march with open-carry firearms; one recalled declaring: “We’re just here to protect property and make sure nothing gets burned down.” Right-wingers in Mount Vernon organized for weekly counterprotests that merged COVID-era paranoia with vitriol toward the “woke” protesters.

The physics of American history is that for every action — the end of slavery, or the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s — there is an opposite and often greater than equal reaction, drawing us ceaselessly back to our past.

The 2020 protests awakened the ghosts of Colfax, Tulsa, and the 16th Street Baptist Church, and a new class of media hucksters and pseudo-intellectuals was there to exploit them.

None more so than Chris Rufo, a second-tier pundit who rose as the “brains” of the George Floyd backlash. “After the death of George Floyd in 2020, it seemed like all of our institutions suddenly shifted overnight,” Rufo claimed amid a flurry of Fox News and podcast appearances that popularized his misused scare term of “critical race theory” in classrooms.

The push merged quickly with the unrest over pandemic-era school closings and lockdowns, and fueled a national network of book-banning groups like Moms for Liberty. And while many of the Black Lives Matters marchers rested their weary feet, entrenched interests like police unions, their lobbyists, and the lawmakers they finance, went to work.

» READ MORE: Children of the 1960s watch in pain as the story of our lifetime is erased | Will Bunch

The handful of Republicans who’d briefly backed the legislation sponsored by Black South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott titled the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which sought to limit so-called qualified immunity that shields cops from accountability over alleged brutality, walked away from it.

Instead, the party rallied behind Trump, who promised voters to cut money to “any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.”

To be sure, there has been a scattered but significant push for overdue police reforms on the local level. Writing this week in the Washington Post, law professor Paul Butler hailed “remarkable transformation in police practices happening where change in the criminal legal system matters most: at the state and local levels,” and he’s not wrong.

We’ve seen it here in Philadelphia, which enacted a law to ban the sometime frivolous police traffic stops linked to a disproportionate number of shootings, and in places like Denver, a leader in sending mental health professionals on calls that used to be handled by cops.

But these changes are getting swamped by an almost manic push with the Trump restoration to undo civil rights reforms enacted in the 1960s, end all federal support for police reform, pardon or undo convictions against cops accused of brutality, defund schools that don’t drop anti-racism measures, and pressure corporations to drop their DEI initiatives.

Some right-wing pundits even want Trump to wipe out the federal conviction of Floyd’s murderer, Chauvin, with a pardon, even though that wouldn’t undo his state conviction.

It’s become almost impossible to imagine how the spark of positive energy that swept America five years ago could be reignited, and that was before a repressive Trump regime arrived with threats to crack down on protests with arrests, deportations, and possibly invoking the Insurrection Act to call out troops.

“You have a lot of folks, too, within advocacy spaces [who are] a little bit afraid to engage at the moment because of the disposition of the current administration and what appears to be a willingness to go after their perceived political enemies,” Williams acknowledged. But how much unraveling of 406 years of wildly uneven racial progress will occur if activists wait four years to come out of what the professor called “hibernation”?

The reality is that 2029 may be too long to wait. On the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder, I’d urge people to go back and rewatch those nine minutes and 29 seconds and remember how it made you feel about injustice in America.

And if you’re one of the millions who marched that fateful spring, look in the mirror and ask yourself what you’ve done lately to advance a true racial reckoning, and end abusive policing.

The spirit of George Floyd is pleading with you not to forget what happened that afternoon in May 2020.