This piece lives halfway down the post/page, exploring the Trump's whipsawing of all things DEI related:
They’re literally ignoring the biggest story of the decade, if not of our lifetimes. While the top headlines obsessed over Elon’s limb placement, I had to travel all the way to the India Tribune to find the full story. It was headlined, “Trump signs executive order ending diversity discrimination in federal government, private sector.” You’d think it would have been bigger news.
The Tribune’s sub-headline added, “The order revokes previous diversity and inclusion policies, calling for a merit-based approach to opportunities and ensuring compliance with federal civil rights laws.” Even that was a pitiful understatement.
The truth is, Trump just nuked DEI. From orbit.
It was like The Apprentice met The Presidency. Yesterday, Trump signed his second consecutive DEI order, Tuesday’s even more detailed and specific than Monday’s, and his Office of Personnel Management issued a tart memorandum. It informed all federal agencies that, by no later than 5pm tonight, they must close DEI all offices, delete all DEI websites, cancel all scheduled DEI “training,” terminate all DEI contractors, place all DEI staff on paid leave, and then prepare for staff reductions by the end of business on the last day of this month, January 31st.
Boom! You’re fired. Axed, laid off, made redundant, severed, separated, and terminated with prejudice.
Trump’s team isn’t just messing around, either. It’s not just performative. They can try to re-name DEI into something else, to try burying it in the bureaucratic depths, but it won’t work this time. Trump’s team is already onto that little game:
They’ve also required every federal agency to list their DEI employees as of November 5, 2024 —election day— just in case they were smuggled into other jobs after Trump’s win in a cryptic effort to save them from getting fired and keep the resistance going.
Behold the example email attached to the OPM’s Memo, for sending to all federal employees, whose week is already off to a rocky start, what with having to come in to the office today:
Note that, according to this email, any employee who knows about efforts to disguise DEI using “coded or imprecise language” and who doesn’t report it can face “adverse consequences.”
In other words, just give us a reason. We dare you.
But there was so much more. Yesterday’s order also rescinded a long list of “opportunity” orders stretching back all the way to 1965 (the “Equal Employment Opportunity” order signed by President Johnson). It ordered all federal procurement agencies to stop requiring federal contractors to comply with “diversity” or “affirmative action” policies, but rather to encourage those contractors to “advance the policy of individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.”
Agencies must now prioritize speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in contracting, and discard any social goals. Imagine that.
The Department of Education was directed to send an anti-DEI memo to all educational institutions receiving federal subsidies.
President Trump also encouraged the private sector to follow the federal government’s lead and “end illegal D.E.I. discrimination and preferences and comply with all federal civil-rights laws.”
He also directed federal agencies to investigate corporations and foundations to ensure compliance with the law. Every agency was directed to single out nine potential lawsuits against major players—forming a vast compliance dragnet:
As a part of this plan, each agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, 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.
That single paragraph was a strategic masterstroke that will cause a mad scramble at the biggest and most influential institutions in the country to immediately revise their employment policies. It will immediately shut up and shut down all internal and external DEI messaging at these institutions, as they scramble to get out of the compliance crosshairs.
By decentralizing the huge job of identifying potential lawsuits down to the individual agencies, the Trump administration multiplied its enforcement powers. The order was literally an anti-DEI multiplier.
🔥 It seems so obvious now that we can see it. This kind of bold, fearless action was literally the only way to really root out the sunken tendrils of the racist DEI practices that had become irretrievably enmeshed into all our public and private institutions. Trump’s executive orders will trigger a kind of rapid immune response, the country’s projectile vomiting of long-standing, unfair, woke hiring practices.
What a time to be alive.
Trump’s orders weren’t gentle. They weren’t polite, compromising, or a mere shift in policy; they were a battering ram aimed directly at DEI’s institutional infrastructure. Trump isn’t doing the work—the system is being forced to purge itself, violently and suddenly, of deeply embedded practices that many people sadly concluded were untouchable.
The genius in Trump’s orders was in its bare-knuckled aggression. They didn’t nibble around the edges or cautiously test the waters; they are kicking down the DEI door and setting the woke house on fire. Institutions that leaned heavily on DEI to shield their mediocrity or dress up their faux ideological conformity are now scrambling to protect themselves, not out of principle, but out of sheer self-preservation.
The speed and scope of the reaction to the orders could achieve in mere months what it might have taken decades of lawsuits and debates to accomplish. The DEI regime is being forced to confront its own contradictions, and whether you view it as a restoration of fairness and merit, or as an overdue reckoning of justice, it’s undeniably bold.
While Trump just effortlessly unleashed a package of executive orders that were institutional dynamite and change everything, yesterday corporate media busied itself by refereeing Elon Musk’s alleged Nazi Wave Olympics.
DEI is so over. Put a fork in it; it’s done.
🔥 These DEI orders, memos, and draft emails weren’t created in the last two days during the Administration’s rush to move into DC offices. Trump’s Cabinet hasn’t even been approved yet. These swift management actions—like placing federal DEI staff immediately on leave and directing the agencies to promptly terminate diversity-related programs—demonstrate a meticulous, coordinated strategy that could not possibly have been formulated overnight.
In other words, they’ve been working on this for a long time. And somehow, they managed to keep it all under wraps. No leaks. Think about that.
Now compare what we’re seeing to Trump’s first term.
Actually, never mind Trump’s first term. This strategic master class is like nothing we have ever seen from a new presidential administration. Trump just invented a brand new benchmark, and has redefined what it means to hit the ground running. His political enemies are so far behind that they are vanishing from the rear-view mirror. It’s not just that Trump is already scoring touchdowns while the Democrats are still warming up; he’s landscaping the football field and installing more Trump-only touchdown zones.
He’s re-writing the rules in real time. Critics point to how easy executive orders are to undo, but they miss the point entirely. By outsourcing the work, Trump is reconfiguring society itself. And since it’s all based on the existing legal framework provided by the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and federal civil rights laws, it will be heinously difficult to oppose.
The speed —such as requiring things be done today— defeats lawfare. A lot of stuff will be moot long before it can get in front of a judge.
And remember, this is only one of Trump’s initiatives. The same strategic thinking is suffused throughout the rest of the many, many orders that are right now transforming the Executive Branch of the United States government.
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