The Trump Administration’s War on DEI

Over the past week, Donald Trump has rolled out a horrifying number of anti-trans executive orders, some probably illegal. I won’t list them all. Feel free to give links in the comments.

The anti-trans actions are the tip of the spear. Other groups will be targeted if these orders can be made to eliminate trans people from public life and likely otherwise. The Dobbs decision has already taken a constitutional and adjudicated right away from half the population. Trans people are a much smaller part of the population and therefore easier to target.

The anti-trans actions are part of anti-DEI actions, which figure in even more of Trump’s executive actions. I think that this focus, so early in the administration, reveals a weakness that can be exploited: A major objective of the administration is apparently to make the government entirely white cishet men, probably Christian nationalist as well. This is not an objective held by a majority of the population.

The rhetoric of the executive orders is ugly, particularly in the anti-trans sections, for the purpose of dehumanization. I’m not going to quote it. The general sense is that

• There are only two sexes
• Gender does not exist as a category; only sex
• Medical gender-affirming means are illegitimate for this purpose.
• Means may be taken to force trans people to “admire” their birth-assigned gender.

The discussions of sex and gender run into the usual difficulties. One executive order declares that sex is determined at conception, which makes us all female, because fetuses are all female until they are developed enough, at about six weeks, to produce masculinizing hormones. The oninious indication, though, is that the administration will try to use “at conception” as a 14^th-Amendment argument against all abortion. Gender-affirming means are, of course, just fine for people like Elon Musk.

The difficulties in definition, however, are useful to the wielders of the executive orders, allowing broad application to people who are to be silenced or removed from society. The larger project is to solidify sex roles and enforce them.

Trump blamed DEI this morning for last night’s airline crash. Of course he did. It is the source of all evil, according to him. It appears in the memo freezing government funds.

The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

This is a bizarre formulation, but it’s about DEI.

The denials that diversity is a uniting and positive feature of the armed forces, that it is in fact more supportive of merit in hiring than whatever the administration proposes to replace it with, suffuse many of the executive orders, even those not expressly anti-trans or anti-DEI.

This is potentially a liability for the administration because the American people, by large margins, don’t agree with most of the administration positions in this respect. Yes, the administration weaponized some very specific accusations during the campaign. But the wide support for DEI, although it might not be expressed by that acronym, can be used against them.