Donald Trump knew exactly what his audience wanted to hear when he addressed a group of firebrand conservatives in March 2023, a moment when it was still far from clear he would be the Republican presidential nominee.
“On day one, I will revoke Joe Biden’s crazy executive order installing Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion czars in every federal agency,” Trump promised an enthusiastic crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I will immediately terminate all staffers hired to implement this horrible agenda.”
And that wasn’t all. Trump also said he would pursue a “restitution fund” to help people allegedly hurt by DEI efforts. “They’re so un-American. They’re so un-American,” Trump said of the programs. “We will ban all racial discrimination by the government.”
That speech provided an early glimpse of the loathing – what critics call an obsession – that Trump and many in his orbit feel toward programs that fall under the heading of diversity, equity and inclusion. The antipathy is now playing out in dramatic fashion, as Trump devotes a striking amount of his energy and rhetoric in the early days of his term to attacking the idea and tearing down the reality of DEI.
After ordering all federal DEI programs shut down a few hours after taking office, Trump on Thursday blamed DEI, without evidence, for a plane and helicopter collision that killed 67 people, suggesting a diversity push had blocked qualified applicants from becoming air traffic controllers. “Brilliant people have to be in those positions,” Trump told reporters.
Democrats fired back that Trump was instinctively blaming minorities and the programs that help them. “The issue with our country is not its diversity,” said Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Illinois). “It’s the lack of leadership in the White House and unqualified Cabinet. Trump’s actions and words are dangerous, racist, and ignorant – simply un-American.”
The fight is much broader than a single tragedy.
DEI in recent years has become a stand-in of sorts for much that conservatives dislike about the country’s direction, especially liberals’ focus on inequality and institutional efforts to correct it. DEI has become a catchall pejorative among many conservatives for any program or policy seeking to provide equal access for people of colour, women, the LGBTQ+ community or other marginalized groups.
Attacks on DEI also embody a fury that self-satisfied elites are ostensibly manipulating society to hurt hardworking Americans, even while lecturing them on moral issues.
At issue, in essence, are two bitterly opposed visions of America: Some see an urgent moral need to correct the country’s age-old injustices, while others contend that out-of-control social engineering is forcing racist distinctions on a country that is otherwise largely colour-blind.
“I think they are harping on DEI because of the cultural significance of suggesting some people don’t belong here, some people are not good for the system, they’re just here to drag us down,” said Theodore Johnson, a scholar on race and democracy. “‘And now look what they’ve done – they’ve crashed a plane and a helicopter in the Potomac.’”
Edward Blum, president of the American Alliance for Equal Rights, which files litigation against DEI and affirmative action programs, countered that treating people differently based on race or ethnicity is a perversion of the civil rights movement, not an extension of it.
“Are there pockets of racism in America? Yes. Are there pockets of antisemitism in America? Yes. Are there pockets of homophobia in America? Yes. Do they exist in every country in the world? They do,” Blum said. “It is impossible to stamp out bigotry, antisemitism and homophobia. You cannot remedy past discrimination with new discrimination.”
It took just hours after Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20 for the attacks on DEI efforts to burst forth.
The new president immediately put all employees of federal DEI programs on leave, a prelude to reassigning them or laying them off. Trump also ordered the suspension of rules aimed at helping women and minorities win federal contracts, and he directed agencies to draw up lists of private companies that could be investigated for their DEI practices.
Trump’s Cabinet officials have rushed to show they get the message. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has already created a task force charged with shutting down programs across the Pentagon, declared on X that “DoD ≠ DEI.” He added a note saying: “No exceptions, name-changes, or delays. Those who do not comply will no longer work here.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs boasted on Monday that it had put “nearly 60” employees who had been “solely focused” on DEI on leave, noting for good measure that one of them was making more than $220,000 a year. “We are proud to have abandoned the divisive DEI policies of the past and pivot back to VA’s core mission,” said spokesperson Morgan Ackley.
Much of the groundwork for this flurry was laid two years ago by Project 2025, an agenda assembled by conservative groups. It accused DEI programs of reflecting a “managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology” and urged officials to “eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects.”
DEI supporters say that sort of language badly misrepresents their efforts, which the say are about leveling the playing field, not tilting it. DEI programs often include such elements as antidiscrimination training, efforts to ensure that women are paid fairly and initiatives to inform people of color about job openings.
Kenji Yoshino, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, said effective DEI programs do not focus on lifting up a particular group, but on ensuring the rules are fair. He gave an example: The percentage of female symphony orchestra musicians rose from 5 percent in the 1970s to 35 percent in 2016, largely because auditioners started positioning candidates behind a screen so their gender was not apparent.
“Everyone who talks about meritocracy can see that is a more meritocratic system,” Yoshino said.
But he conceded that not all DEI programs are run that way. “My claim is not that all forms of DEI are defensible,” Yoshino said. “It’s rather that the claim that all forms of DEI is indefensible is itself indefensible. What the administration is doing is painting with an incredibly broad brush.”
The debate over DEI has gone far beyond such practicalities, as the term has become a cultural buzzword that instantly identifies a speaker’s worldview. That was evident at Trump’s recent news conference on the plane crash, when he said “common sense” suggested DEI was responsible for the deadly disaster.
Trump ridiculed a Federal Aviation Administration push to hire disabled people, including those with such conditions as paralysis and dwarfism. “Can you imagine?” he said. “Brilliant people have to be in those positions.” The Washington Post Fact Checker found that the FAA effort originated in the Obama years, and that Trump had left the policy unchanged while his administration also launched a pilot program targeting the same disabilities he complained about.
This is hardly the first time Republicans have blamed disasters on Democrats’ DEI focus, suggesting either that officials were promoted beyond their abilities or that authorities were focused on “woke” initiatives instead of doing their jobs. After Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-New Jersey) said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was “worried too much about pronouns, worried too much about DEI policies.”
Similarly, some conservatives blamed DEI for the assassination attempt on Trump in July, arguing baselessly that female Secret Service agents hired under diversity initiatives were part of the problem. And as fires swept through the Los Angeles area in early January, Trump ally Elon Musk posted on X: “They prioritized DEI over saying lives and homes.”
None of these claims were backed by evidence. Taking it further, some Republicans derided then-Vice President Kamala Harris as a “DEI candidate” when she emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee last summer, suggesting she would not be leading the Democratic ticket if she were not a woman of colour.
Some liberal activists said such claims are a way for Republicans to deflect scrutiny of their own positions.
“It is easy to tap into a belief that a pilot cannot be Black and good, a surgeon cannot have gone through a rigorous curriculum, if he or she is Black. There’s lots of people who believe that,” said Andre Perry, director of the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution. “Politically, clearly, [Trump] will use DEI as a way to mask his own policies and to prevent any kind of deviation from his agenda.”
The arc of America’s approach to DEI, in business and law as well as politics, has followed a clear trajectory, gaining momentum as Trump was leaving office in 2020 and now losing altitude with his return.
After George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, the country underwent a soul-searching on racial matters. Many Americans concluded that people of color were not proportionately represented in the circles of power, and companies scrambled to put them on their boards and in their executive suites.
When Joe Biden unseated Trump, it was thanks in part to the support of Black voters disenchanted with Trump’s record and rhetoric on race and eager for a change. Biden responded in part by establishing DEI efforts throughout the federal government, as well as seeking to ensure that Black communities benefited from his spending bills.
But a legal earthquake struck in June 2023, when the Supreme Court – whose conservative majority had been cemented by Trump – ruled that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. “That was an energizing moment in the conservative legal movement and in the greater American population,” Blum said.
Vice President JD Vance, then a senator from Ohio, was part of the stepped-up conservative pushback. He wrote to the president of his alma mater, Ohio State University, in December 2023 to complain about its diversity efforts. “It seems that the rot of ‘DEI’ – a modern gloss on racism, antisemitism and other ancient prejudices – is pervasive at Ohio State,” Vance complained.
Vance also co-sponsored a bill to end federal DEI programs.
At the same time, a growing list of companies – recently joined by Target – have curtailed their DEI programs in the wake of Trump’s victory, in many cases reversing decisions they had made in the wake of Floyd’s murder. Other firms, however, reiterated their commitment to such initiatives, including Costco and Microsoft.
The backlash is in many ways being completed by Trump’s ascent.
As for the recent plane crash, it could take months for the National Transportation Safety Board to conclude its investigation, but there is no evidence so far that the identity of the FAA, military or civilian personnel involved played a role. A preliminary report obtained by The Post showed that the outpost monitoring the airspace around Reagan National Airport was understaffed when the collision occurred.
“It’s troubling to me because it’s so unsubstantiated,” Yoshino said of Trump’s claim. “It’s a very short step to saying, ‘We see a person who is not White or a man in charge of this, so therefore they must be incompetent.’”