Trump Takes a Wrecking Ball to DEI – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

It makes perfect sense for President Donald Trump to dive headfirst into a death struggle with diversity, equity, and inclusion, the programmatic expression of woke ideology. Aside from globalization’s decimation of America’s working class, it is unlikely that anything accounts more for Trump’s rise than the social chaos tied to wokeness and his fearlessness in condemning it. Yes, unchecked immigration, inflation, and crime were the proximate causes of Trump’s reelection, but hovering over the election was the bizarre shift in American elites’ worldview, especially since the 2020 killing of George Floyd. This transformation — which includes men playing in women’s sports and large companies proudly announcing race and sex hiring quotas — “sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation,” in the words of political commentator Andrew Sullivan. 

Most recently, the Boy Scouts of America removed “Boy” from its name to sound more inclusive (becoming “Scouting America”), an insanity that provoked comedian Bill Maher into letting the cat out of the bag: “This is the kind of thing that gets Trump elected!”

Americans have consistently rejected the woke belief system, which is known by a variety of labels — DEI, social justice, antiracism — but which has coalesced around a few basic principles: 1. All cultures are equal in their ability to provide their members with the tools they need to thrive; 2. Therefore, all disparities between racial and other identity groups are the result of discrimination; 3. Therefore, equal social and economic outcomes between groups — “equity” — is the only reliable proof of “social justice.” 

These ideas have rattled around academia for the last sixty years as liberal education drowned in a sea of postmodern “critical theory.” But the policies now most frequently referred to as DEI have been deeply embedded in civil rights law for several decades. Political scientist Richard Hanania maintains in The Origins of Woke that civil rights laws — specifically the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the executive orders, court decrees, and bureaucratic “guidance” that followed from it — created a regime in which virtually all organizations are deemed racist if any of their policies result in unequal outcomes between racial groups. DEI, insists Hanania, is really “just civil rights law” managed through the creation of a large permanent bureaucracy.

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print edition.

No one has ever accused Donald Trump of being a social theorist, but his early anti-woke actions strongly suggest that he or someone in his circle understands that the federal bureaucracy governs coercively over such policies as racial preferences, contract set-asides, “antiracism” training, “microaggressions” counseling, speech code enforcement, and “environmental justice.” 

In his first ten days in office, Trump signed fifty-six executive orders, no fewer than nine of which, according to one analysis, attack some manifestation of DEI. But more impressive than the speed and alacrity of these orders is their detail and coherence. Trump ordered all departments in the federal government to “terminate … all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions,” including the “Chief Diversity Officer position.” The executive orders abolished the guarantee of equal group outcomes by ending “all ‘equity action plans,’ ‘equity’ actions, initiatives, or programs” and “‘equity-related’ grants or contracts,” as well as “all DEI performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.”

Trump also included a powerful mechanism by which these measures could be enforced. His executive order on “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity” includes a directive that all organizations doing business with the government certify that they adhere to colorblind policies. If they don’t, the president can utilize the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era statute that imposes damages on companies that are in violation of federal contracting rules. 

And Trump is not waiting for violations of his orders to occur. One of his executive orders instructs government agencies to identify nine potential investigations into whether organizations are complying; that order explicitly targets “foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”

Trump deserves accolades for bringing the Republican Party to the realization that the federal government can be a tool for desired social change, something the Left has long recognized. President Joe Biden’s mandated race preferences and DEI rules across ninety different federal agencies were only the latest strides in the Left’s wildly successful “long march through the institutions.” 

America Goes Woke

But the clearest sign that Trump believes “politics can change the culture” might be the seventy-eight executive orders he’s rescinded, none more important than Executive Order 11246. President Lyndon Johnson signed this executive order in 1965 around the same time he delivered his landmark speech at Howard University in which he averred that it is not enough to liberate blacks through “equality of opportunity” and that society must achieve “equality as a result.” 

This speech was a pivotal moment in American history: Johnson had invited the ethic of “equity” to compete with America’s founding ideal of individual equality under the law. 

It is possible that the universities had a role in liberalism’s turn from nondiscrimination to group equity. In his landmark study, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, Christopher Rufo makes a compelling case that radical intellectuals espousing variants of critical theory captured universities’ curricula, spewing out generations of woke graduates to populate America’s public and private bureaucracies. Even Richard Hanania, who sees civil rights law as the culprit, concedes, “People who become civil rights lawyers or EEOC bureaucrats tend to be extremely woke.”

But wokeness was established in civil rights law for what appears to be reasons of practicality. Johnson’s executive order, followed by other executive orders, court decisions, and regulatory rulings, pulled civil rights law in a direction in which “disparate impact” was the most efficient measure of wrongdoing.

As first articulated in Griggs v. Duke Power Company in 1971 by the Supreme Court, and then codified into law in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, if an employer reports having too few minority employees in any particular job, the firm’s hiring practices can be subject to “strict scrutiny.” How few minorities are too few? Regulations issued by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs required employers to assume that all racial groups have a proportionately equal number of qualified candidates. According to researcher Robert R. Detlefsen, employers were to operate under the assumption that “but for discrimination, statistical parity among racial and ethnic groups would be the norm.” 

Any “disparate impact,” regardless of intent, would be treated as racial discrimination, a powerful incentive for employers to adopt racial quotas.

Bill Wilson/The American Spectator

The disparate impact standard shattered the postwar liberal consensus that a man should be judged by his character, not the color of his skin. When liberalism moved, in sociologist Eric Kaufmann’s words, to “abridging liberty to achieve equal outcomes,” America’s culture war was ignited. 

Disparate impact has had a profoundly corrosive effect on American life. The idea that any racial disparity in any institution is the result of discrimination has led some medical schools, airlines, the Federal Aviation Administration, and even the Secret Service to admit or employ underprepared but underrepresented individuals, at great public risk. 

In some cities, racial disparities in crime have led police to pull back on arrests. Prosecutors in certain cities are not prosecuting whole categories of crime because perpetrators are more likely to be black. “As long as racism remains the only allowable explanation for racial disparities,” writes the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, “our civilization will continue to crumble.” 

Most Americans abhor policies that favor members of one racial group at the expense of members of another. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 74 percent of Americans feel race should not be a factor in hiring decisions. The ultra-liberal state of California voted for Democrat Joe Biden by a 30-percentage-point margin in 2020, yet it also voted by nearly 15 percentage points against Proposition 16, which was a bid to restore state-sanctioned racial preferences. Even a majority-minority state opposes woke policies.

Trump will not be able to claim success for his executive orders unless he ensures their enforcement and shepherds supportive legislation through Congress. As one critic in the Hill explains, “Ending DEI requires something more democratic than executive orders the next president can undo with the stroke of a pen.” 

But given the centrality of the federal government in creating this despised racial spoils system, Trump has established a plausible path toward race neutrality in our government, schools, corporations, and institutions that could give Americans the freedom to finally expect fair treatment.

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our spring 2025 print magazine.