What's the Point of Trump's War on D.E.I.?

If Donald Trump’s first days in the White House, in 2017, were about shock and awe—his haunting “American carnage” speech, the Muslim ban—the 2025 version, at least initially, felt more dutiful, a bit weirder, but ultimately not quite as scary. Trump 45 talked about a “new vision” to “govern our land” and promised his voters “you will never be ignored again.” Trump 47 seemed bored for the first half of his inaugural speech, then rambled on about Panama, Mars, and “the electric-vehicle mandate.” The flurry of executive orders that followed might have made for good headlines because they touched on culture-war topics such as trans rights and D.E.I., but outside of a few notable exceptions—withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and curbing renewable-energy programs—Trump’s first round of legislation mostly seemed like repurposed archival footage from his campaign, chopped up and stretched out into a new, thin form. The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. Denali is once again Mount McKinley, because we’re not cancelling dead white men anymore, especially not for some tribe. D.E.I. is over at federal agencies and in the military. Now please go fight among yourselves about all this culture-war stuff while we deregulate everything.

This period of unhinged, but perhaps not so consequential, Trump theatre lasted until Monday, when his Office of Management and Budget released a memo freezing all federal spending “that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” We still don’t know the extent of the order, its legality, or who, exactly, it will affect, but the brazenness of the move suggests that Trump intends to run the country as a petty despot who values fealty to him over allegiance to the country. (The White House later rescinded the order, while also saying that the spending review remains in “full force and effect.” A judge has paused its implementation until February 3rd.)

Given the potential seriousness of Trump’s freeze, I think it’s good practice, especially after the recurring freakouts between 2016 and 2020, to point out when Trump mostly seems to be doing something for purely symbolic reasons and when he’s actually trying to get something done. The first Trump Administration and the constant stream of stories that ended in Russiagate ultimately desensitized much of the public to the actual bad things he was doing, disoriented the audience’s priorities, and might have even led to a quiet backlash or at least a sense of disbelief that Trump could actually be that bad. The renaming of bodies of water and mountains, for example, is easy enough to cast aside as Trumpian bluster, but what about the handful of executive orders Trump signed regarding D.E.I. which included the end of all such programs in the military and the federal government as well as the repeal of a 1965 executive order that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, gender, and national origin? It’s still unclear how many employees will lose their jobs—the executive order calls for a list of everyone who might work in some D.E.I.-related endeavor and a review, which could either mean that everyone who has said a word about racial or gender equality or diversity will be out of work, or it could just mean that after a few high-profile firings of D.E.I. officers this list never really gets made, the review never happens, and everyone moves on to the next dimension of the culture war.

When the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions two years ago, the outrage from liberals and Democratic elected officials was relatively muted. There are many possible explanations for this, most notably that perhaps the people who were the maddest about the decision didn’t have the same platforms as the people who either shrugged or cheered it on. But over all it seemed like much of the public agreed with Sandra Day O’Connor who, in an earlier ruling on affirmative action in 2003, famously said that affirmative action should not really be necessary in twenty-five years. The clock, it seemed, had run out. Similarly, I suspect most Americans won’t miss D.E.I., which has become another digital training you have to finish before you get your first paycheck and a way for management to control what their workers say. (I doubt they’ll cheer on its end, either, largely because I don’t think most Americans really care one way or another. A recent poll by YouGov, in fact, found around half of Americans had a somewhat or very favorable opinion of D.E.I. programs, and less than thirty per cent said that they had a very unfavorable opinion.) This isn’t really the fault of the employees who work in these programs. I’m sure most of them envisioned something a bit more radical or at least useful when they signed up, but, if you’re a college graduate with a humanities degree and want to make a salary while still vaguely doing something that deals with reducing racism in America, D.E.I. is one of the few possible career paths. The problem, at a grand scale, is that D.E.I.’s malleability and its ability to survive in pretty much every setting, whether it’s a nearby public school or the C.I.A., means that it has to be generic and ultimately inoffensive, which means that, in the end, D.E.I. didn’t really satisfy anyone.

What it did was provide a safety valve (I am speaking about D.E.I. in the past tense because I do think it will quickly be expunged from the private sector as well) for institutions that were dealing with racial and social-justice problems. If you had a protest on campus over any issue having to do with “diverse students” who wanted “equity,” that now became the provenance of D.E.I. officers who, if they were doing their job correctly, would defuse the situation and find some solution—oftentimes involving a task force—that made the picket line go away. A couple years ago, a D.E.I. officer at Stanford Law School went viral after she supported students who were shutting down a conservative guest speaker. I recall watching the video and feeling both a bit annoyed at yet another instance of pointless and ultimately counterproductive “resistance” and also a bit sad because it was clear that the officer didn’t understand the point of her job. She wasn’t hired to actually join the protest against the conservative speaker. Her job was to intervene, give the students a “space” to vent, and, ultimately, find a solution that didn’t end with Stanford Law going viral for an instance of campus cancel culture.

There’s also the argument that the growth of D.E.I. offices, especially after the George Floyd protests, led to an aggressive and potentially illegal push to hire racial minorities throughout corporate America and academia, which, in turn, led to an overextension and corruption of the original goal of enforcing fair hiring practices to insure that people of all kinds would not be discriminated against. But this narrative also fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of D.E.I. within large institutions. What happened in many workplaces across the country after 2020 was that the people in charge were either genuinely moved by the Floyd protests or they were scared. Both the inspired and the terrified built out a D.E.I. infrastructure in their workplaces. These new employees would be given titles like chief diversity officer or C.D.O., which made it seem like it was part of the C-suite, and would be given a spot at every table, but much like at Stanford Law, their job was simply to absorb and handle any race stuff that happened. D.E.I. didn’t hire itself at Meta. It was embraced by the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who gleefully ended his company’s program earlier this month, signalling to the White House and investors that the days of wokeness at Meta were over. This was the final purpose of D.E.I. programs in corporate America—when the political winds changed this past November, D.E.I. became the convenient fall guy; the best way to signal that you never wanted to do all that woke stuff in the first place was to fire your D.E.I. staff and blame them for forcing you down the wrong path.

Trump, I believe, is doing something similar at a grand scale. He is taking a relatively powerless program, vilifying it, and using its dissolution as proof that he has single-handedly ended the woke era. The clearest example came on Thursday when he outrageously blamed “diversity” for the tragic airline crash in Washington. When his O.M.B. gambit turned into a legal and political disaster this past week, Trump’s Administration retreated to a familiar, safe space. The funding freeze, they said, was only for the parts of the federal government directly affected by Trump’s earlier executive orders, the most prominent being D.E.I. He and his Administration are wielding the word “diversity” both as a slur and an excuse for everything that goes wrong in this country.