By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost
I ended all of the lawless, so-called diversity, equity and inclusion bullshit all across the entire federal government and the private sector.
President Donald Trump May 1, 2025 in Michigan
For years, Donald J. Trump has been a spiteful, crusty, ill-tempered curmudgeon who, since his second inauguration, has been busy attempting to reshape American institutions through ignoring court orders, deporting legal residents including honor students and others who openly object to genocide, firing government workers en masse, and more.
What he has actually succeeded in doing is a work in progress, but the quote above is typical of his habit of exaggerated self-assessment.
The number of specious policy announcements and executive orders is mind-numbing. As I write this, on May 5, he has signed 147 executive orders including a number of which legal experts have said ignore or violate federal laws, regulations and the Constitution.
He has made daily attempts to overwhelm, confuse and distract. As promised, he has used the federal government to engage in revenge and retaliation against political enemies, immigrants and anyone he perceives as taking jobs that he imagines rightfully belong to with more talent which he often refers to as restoring a meritocracy.
He has fired thousands of federal employees, attempted to eliminate entire agencies, canceled at least $3 trillion in federal funding and attempted to dictate what Harvard can teach. He has sent hundreds of people to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador without even a hint of due process.
On April 1, in typically exaggerated numbers, his administration told Newsweek that “over 100,000 illegal immigrants” had been deported. Other sources, suggest smaller numbers.
Many of his executive orders are bewildering, but they still form the foundation of his policies. Their content suggests that many were prepared before the second term began. According to Axios, they “show clear parallels with Project 2025,”any knowledge of which Trump denied during the campaign, saying that he had nothing to do with it.
Some proposals have been blocked by courts, so the policies have been delayed. But in other cases, Trump has defied court orders including refusing to return a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, he “mistakenly deported” to El Salvador.
In a recent White House meeting with Trump, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that he would not return the wrongly deported Abrego Garcia. “Of course, I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said.
“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him.” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said, “That’s not up to us.” However, in an interview with ABC’s Terry Moran on April 29, Trump said that he “could have Abrego Garcia returned to the United States with one phone call,” even though the administration has argued in court that the government has no ability to get him back.
Then, in a May 2025 interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, Trump was asked directly, “…do you have the power to bring Abrego Garcia back as the Supreme Court has ordered?” His answer was ” Well, I have the power to ask for him to come back if I’m instructed by the attorney general that it’s legal to do so.”
Ending DEI with an Executive Order
In an executive order signed in January, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, Trump attempts to rationalize ending all programs, public and private, for diversity, equity and inclusion. (DEI). The targets include a warning to state and school administrators that K-12 schools must eliminate all DEI Initiatives or lose federal funding, and another warning to federal contractors and grantees “to certify that they do not operate any ‘illegal’ DEI programs.”
DEI emerged from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Widespread coverage of that struggle forced many Americans to recognize the brutal consequences of entrenched racism and the need to combat institutional discrimination.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation), color and national origin; DEI initiatives followed. The rationale was to create more equitable and inclusive environments for all, particularly those who have historically been marginalized. Very often the effort was bipartisan.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations. By 2003, corporations spent $8 billion annually on diversity mandates.
In August 2021, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Nasdaq’s proposed rules requiring listed companies to ensure women and minority directors were on their boards or provide an explanation of why they were not.
Then there was the (perhaps inevitable) reaction from those who felt, somehow, left out, but also from those who were comfortable with the traditional bias in favor of white men. One of these is certainly the current Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Darren Beattie.
In 2024 Mr. Beattie famously tweeted that “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
Critics have strategically and inaccurately represented DEI programs as forcing the hiring of historically marginalized people, including women, regardless of talent and then mischaracterizing them as “DEI hires” and scapegoats for an endless list of disasters.
I believe the attempt to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs across both the federal government and the private sector is Trump’s most pernicious attack on established government practices. He has even urged government employees to inform on each other in order to expose any attempts to hide diversity programs.
Project 2025 A Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise
The proposals in Project 2025 run more than 900 pages and form the basis for many executive orders. The document, written at the Heritage Foundation, was published in 2023. Russell Vought, one of the co-authors, was appointed as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a post he previously held in Trump’s first term.
What Vought thinks about presidential power is important. He believes in a unitary executive. He holds that the president has the power to slash spending programs without Congressional interference, and he supports stripping federal workers of job protections. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought declared, “We have to solve the woke in the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch.”
Project 2025 contains lists of statements meant to discredit anything related to DEI. Most are misleading. Here are three, followed by parenthetical clarifications on why I consider them misleading.
- Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms. (The phrase “racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda” refers to the teaching about race and racism in American history classes. Racism is part of American history; it cannot be anti-American or ahistorical.)
- Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege.” (“White Privilege” here seems a reference to any and all anti-racist training.)
- Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one-way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. (The “Great Awokening” refers to such things as diversity. The “Left” probably refers to Democrats. Here is all the information you might want on where federal education funds go. As one would expect, it is complicated.)
Blaming DEI for Disasters
There are problems in every organization, but it appears the Trump administration favors blaming everything that goes wrong on DEI. Below are examples, These accusations seem likely to be intended to make it probable that the most gullible will assume that if anyone not white and sometimes not male holds a position regarded as “desirable,” they are very likely to be unqualified. Examples follow:
Recent Failures of Passenger Jets:
- In January 2024, an Alaska Airlines flight experienced a sudden decompression shortly after taking off from Portland, Oregon. An emergency exit door was blown off the plane. Elon Musk, the soon to be Trump appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency, insisted without any evidence that DEI mandated the company hire unqualified pilots and technicians to satisfy the need for diversity.
- In January 2025, 67 people died in a collision of an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. In a press briefing the morning after the crash, Trump offered an explanation for the accident by referring to DEI. He even suggested that former President Joe Biden had lowered the standards for someone to become an air traffic controller, “lower than ever before.” He continued by saying that he had found an article that reported: “The FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.”
The FAA, which employs about 45,000 people including about 14,000 air traffic controllers, does recruit people with disabilities. But the air traffic controllers “must be physically and mentally fit and meet standards for ,,, neurological and psychiatric health.” The recruitment message cited by Trump — obviously as an attempt to find scapegoats for tragedies — has been included on the FAA’s website since at least as early as 2013 and was there during the entirety of the first Trump administration.
Los Angeles Wildfires
In 2025, when the Los Angeles area was devastated by a series of wildfires, Elon Musk (again) was ready with a statement, suggesting that “DEI was the fire chief’s focus and the department and the city spent money on DEI while dangerous brush hadn’t been cleared and fire hydrants didn’t have water.”
Attacking K-12 Education by Attacking DEI
According to Martin West, professor of Education at Harvard, the federal government has a relatively small financial footprint in K-12. It contributes less than 10% of funding, but it plays a key role in distributing federal funds, enforcing civil rights laws and conducting educational research. The pressure to end DEI has proven effective.
The campaign against K-12 education began with a “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Department of Education on Feb. 14. It gave schools, including universities, two weeks to cancel their DEI programs or risk losing federal funding. That period ended on Feb.28.
In the letter the acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education, Craig Trainor, attempted to clarify the “nondiscrimination” obligations of schools that receive federal financial assistance. He begins with an accusation, “In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students. [They] have used race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training and other institutional programming.”
His point was clearly to suggest that people who are white or Asian have been discriminated against in all of the areas mentioned. This is part of an attempt to frame programs promoting diversity as code for hiring or promoting people of color or women regardless of qualifications. This is the same suggestion built into the common, but purposely manipulative term, “reverse discrimination.”
In an attempt to intimidate schools and teachers, Trainor suggests that simply teaching the history of racism in the U.S. may violate the law. It does not.
He also argues that it is illegal to credit, in admissions or hiring, an individual talking about their personal experiences with bigotry or bias. However, according to Ariella Gross, a professor at UCLA School of Law, this is specifically mentioned by the Supreme Court as permissible. She, and a number of fellow law professors argue that the “Dear Colleague letter” is not law, but a “deeply incorrect interpretation of current law.”
Teaching American History Requires Teaching Diversity
In 46 states, American history is required by law or by regulation; in the others it is taught by tradition rather than law. But that leaves us with the essential question: What is American history?
In my decades of teaching, I found American history to be a story of British colonialism, the occupation of Indigenous land, the importation of Africans as slaves, and the eventual revolt against British control.
After the section on the Revolution, I taught American history focused on the creation of a government with a written Constitution and a Bill of Rights that primarily applied to white men. That left the majority marginalized and discriminated against, in sometimes different ways according to ethnicity, race and sex.
Significantly, after the founding, American history is very often dominated by demands for inclusion and equity. Group after group has demanded recognition as legitimate members of the community. Their desire for justice has been fought and died for.
It is simply impossible to teach an honest inclusive American history without discussing those attempts to deny equity and inclusion while also teaching about the various struggles against marginalization and discrimination.
If students are to learn such a history, logic suggests that they will be more likely to approve of, or sympathize with, DEI initiatives. I believe that is likely to be the major reason for the attack on education at all levels.
According to Education Week, a recent poll found that 85 percent of those polled thought that public school (K-12) students should learn about the history of racism and slavery. Nevertheless, since 2021, at least 18 states have imposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics of race and gender.
Coming Up:
Trump’s efforts to reshape American institutions do not end with demolishing DEI. Another central element is the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under the control of the richest person on earth — Trump mega-donor, Elon Musk. DOGE was announced on Jan. 20, 2025, the same day the campaign against DEI began. It will be the subject of an upcoming column.
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Jim Mamer
Jim Mamer is a retired high school teacher. He was a William Robertson Coe Fellow for the Study of American History at Stanford University in 1984. He served as chair of the History and Social Sciences department for 20 years (first at Irvine High and then at Northwood High). He was a mentor teacher in both Modern American History and Student Assessment. In 1992 he was named History and Social Sciences Teacher of the Year by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS).
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