Donald Trump made good this week on his promise to ban the race-based preference system formally known as diversity, equity, and inclusion. (He is likewise moving forward with his pledge to—yet again!—pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords.)
Trump is hardly alone in his disdain for D.E.I., whose web of strategists, consultants, program officers, and training curricula collectively constituted a $7.5 billion industry as of 2020, according to a 2023 report by McKinsey. Billionaire Bill Ackman and indie-media mogul Bari Weiss made dismantling D.E.I. almost personal crusades as reports of anti-Semitism surged on Ivy League campuses.
Indeed, even schools with near-perfect progressive bona fides have recently scrapped once mandatory D.E.I. statements for potential hires, including Harvard and the University of Michigan—the latter having spent more than $30 million to fund its D.E.I. infrastructure in 2023 alone, according to Ilya Shapiro’s new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.
Within weeks of Election Day, meanwhile, corporate giants such as Walmart, Amazon, and Meta announced plans to scale back or outright end D.E.I. initiatives, while Disney recently removed a transgender character from an upcoming children’s series.
There’s even a new “anti-D.E.I.” investment fund from Florida-based Azoria Meritocracy ETF launching this year, which will put its money in every S&P 500 company except those “with explicit racial and gender hiring targets,” according to Azoria C.E.O. and co-founder James Fishback. His new fund is unlikely to invest in corporate giants such as Microsoft and Costco, which intend to retain or even strengthen their D.E.I. commitments.
The focus on D.E.I. is part of a larger pushback anticipated from Trump against all things lefty and woke in the coming weeks and months. In late November, for instance,Trump reportedly decided he would kick transgender personnel out of the military as well as ban new trans recruits. This week, Trump issued an executive order stating that the federal government will recognize only two genders.
Trump will reportedly also extend bans on biological men competing in women’s sports, along with heavy restrictions on surgical interventions for gender-dysphoric children. This week also saw Trump issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship, while a takedown of both critical race theory (C.R.T.) and allegedly inappropriate sexual content in schools is also on the horizon.
With numerous culture-war cases involving youth gender transition and workplace discrimination slated for the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, Trump may very well succeed in his purge of progressivism. But even as popular sentiment is beginning to turn against D.E.I., Trump’s first shot in the war on woke could very well backfire.
There’s even a new “anti-D.E.I.” investment fund, which will put its money in every S&P 500 company except those “with explicit racial and gender hiring targets.”
Trump may have won the Electoral College by a landslide on November 5, but his margin of victory in the popular vote was a mere 1.5 percent. In other words, every vote from the “rainbow coalition” of disaffected Blacks, Hispanics, women, and members of the L.G.B.T. community that went for Trump mattered, and will matter even more in 2028, particularly if the Democrats somehow manage to restore their party’s potency.
The November exit polls give Trump reason to be bullish. A record 30 percent of Black men under 45, for instance, voted for him, as did 54 percent of all Latino men, up from 36 percent in 2020. Despite the election’s outsize focus on abortion, Trump saw a near 10 percent increase in female votes over both 2016 and 2020, along with a massive surge in support by Americans under 30.
As the election made clear, much of America equates wokeness with radicalism. But judging from the administration’s threat of “adverse consequences” for federal employees who fail to report their colleagues for not carrying out the recent executive order and the anti-D.E.I. blueprint drawn up by conservative gadfly Christopher Rufo, the president’s response will be just as extreme as he settles back into office. And for Trump and Trumpism to survive, the G.O.P. needs the continued support of the very groups Trump’s anti-woke agenda is likeliest to harm.
There’s no question that D.E.I. has yet to deliver meaningful change for the minority groups who are its intended beneficiaries. And the failure of such programs to defend Jews from anti-Semitism in the months following Hamas’s October 7 attack came as a shock to many. But watching a chorus of white elites disparage the achievements of minorities many social and economic rungs beneath them feels downright churlish.
It also may prove counterproductive. Exit polls revealed that Trump’s perceived leadership abilities were one of the key reasons Blacks (especially Black men) flocked to the Republican Party last November. But even the most MAGA among them may step back if Trump’s leadership means an assault on all race-based preference programs at a time when white households are still nearly 10 times wealthier than their Black counterparts.
A surprising number of Hispanic voters support Trump’s immigration heavy-handedness: 45 percent approve of the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, according to a 2024 poll from Axios. But an end to sacred totems such as birthright citizenship—which last month Trump described as “ridiculous”—could be perceived by those same voters as unfairly punitive and racially motivated.
L.G.B.T. Americans, meanwhile, already appear to be souring on Trump—12 percent voted Republican this year compared with 27 percent in 2020—a trend that is sure to accelerate if he adopts the recommendations of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s comprehensive and controversial policy agenda, which calls for limiting or eliminating many protections for sexual minorities.
Trump certainly has his work cut out for him. Compared to reducing crippling consumer costs, fixing America’s fentanyl crisis, and ending a pair of foreign wars, dismantling D.E.I. seems a lot less urgent. Particularly when so few in Trumpworld appear interested in dismantling the racial and political conditions that fueled the rise of doctrines such as D.E.I. and C.R.T. in the first place.
David Christopher Kaufman is an editor and columnist at the New York Post, a regular opinion writer for The Telegraph, and an adjunct fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute
