Photo by Bruno Figueiredo
Within 24 hours of becoming president, Donald Trump released his first White House Fact Sheet, “Ending the Radical and Illegal DEI.” He signed an Executive Order claiming that eliminating programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.”
Trump, and by extension the MAGA Republican Party, link eliminating diversity and equality to promoting civil rights. This is not a new concept. However, one must understand our history to understand how these two practices are linked to civil rights.
The civil rights movement exploded after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 rejected African American citizenship claims. This decision was not based on economic claims of owning slaves as property but on racial claims that citizens who were seen as Black had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
The Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War to protect not only the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons but all people treated as Black, and in due course, it was extended to all minorities. Nearly a hundred years later, with the majority of Supreme Court justices being Republican-appointed, the Brown v. Board of Educationdecision was released. It found that denying racial diversity in public schools through segregation was unconstitutional.
In other words, according to the Supreme Court, the Constitution guarantees equality and diversity among citizens in our legal and educational institutions.
The bizarre importance of attacking transgender people.
Trump links civil rights to restoring “biological truth to the federal government.” This was a direct attack on citizens who identify with a gender different from what was determined at birth. We are talking about a minuscule percentage of Americans. Published findings show that 1.6% of U.S. adults are trans or nonbinary.
Is this a national emergency? Or is this a hot cultural issue among Republicans? According to a Pew Research Center survey, 66% of them say society has gone too far in accepting people who are transgender. Still, roughly eight in ten Americans say transgender people face at least some discrimination, with 35% of Republicans saying there is a great deal or a fair amount of discrimination against trans people.
Despite the majority of Americans believing that defining the rights of transenders requires a thoughtful approach, one of Mr. Trump’s most aired ads attacking presidential candidate Harris ended with a tagline raising the issue of transgender people as not part of America’s society: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The implication is that Democrats would treat transgender citizens better than everyday Americans.
One of the first executive orders he issued was one mandating that those federal agencies “that prompt users for their pronouns” in their email systems, like Outlook, be turned off. They had 72 hours to comply or jeopardize their job.
It seems petty, but it does conjure up an image of Big Brother closely looking over your shoulder to see how you sign off on your emails. This is being done to force federal workers to adhere to the new administration’s rules: Employees must repudiate their freedom to declare their gender.
It’s unclear how Trump’s attorneys will align this mandate with the Supreme Court’s decision protecting the rights of trans and gay citizens from being fired due to their sexual orientation and gender identity.
Trump is setting up a “spoils system” of government patronage.
Although Trump denied reading the Heritage Report Project 2025, his newly appointed public officers immediately implemented its reactionary objectives.
Trump appointed Russell Vought, coordinator for Project 2025, as the new Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought supports withholding funds appropriated by Congress and vows to roll back the merit-based career civil service. This goes beyond civil rights by tossing out legal contractual union rights, which Heritage’s Report ignored.
For instance, the report’s Equity Agenda recommended that employees breaking the law by openly promoting diversity could lose their jobs. It stated that participation in any DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, would be grounds for termination of their employment.
In line with that objective, the Washington Post found that dozens of federal agency workers who didn’t work on diversity or inclusion issues were placed on administrative leave in the week that Trump was sworn in as president. Their findings showed that some federal agencies targeted “people who have expressed interest or participated in programs related to DEI.”
By pushing these employees out of government jobs, he borrowed a practice from President Andrew Jackson, who created a “spoils system” of government patronage. This was accomplished by rewarding his supporters to fill the empty seats available after he removed about 10 percent of all government postings.
For both Jackson and Trump, having supporters fill taxpayer-funded federal jobs instills personal loyalty to the president in their party’s ranks. See – Trump uses 3 Jacksonian Strategies.
Trump downplayed attacking diversity to allow others to do so.
Other Trump executive orders demanded that DEI “language in Federal discourse, communications, and publications” be removed. These orders merely resuscitate his prior Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,which he signed two months before the 2020 election and was revoked by President Joe Biden.
It’s possible that he saw this order as cementing his voter base by declaring that anti-American race and sex stereotyping would be eliminated from government agencies.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, he may have decided it best not to broadcast messages that frightened too many people about losing their civil rights. So, he let others do that to allow him to deny responsibility for their statements but enact those policies once elected. Project 2025 identified the most reactionary decrees that Trump should pursue.
Historically, such a sweeping move would have been foreshadowed in a newly nominated party’s candidate at their convention. In Trump’s 90-minute acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, not a word was spoken about DEI or diversity.
That’s because Trump didn’t want to give the media and Democrats a paper trail exposing his anti-diversity strategy before taking office. Since promoting diversity is tied to promoting civil rights to those who are disenfranchised from voting or receiving social services, Trump would have to defend those intentions. Better to execute this strategy after taking office and avoid any pushback beforehand.
It helped avoid a public debate by not warning the public what the Republican Party would support. What better way to secure its silence than to have its platform not mention DEI, diversity, equity, or inclusion? This was accomplished by eliminating the chance of any questions being raised in an open-air platform committee to approve the text.
No committee discussions would happen because Trump created the Republican Party’s Platform with his advisors in private without formal party involvement. When he completed the final document, he presented it to the Republican Party to adopt as their new platform. It was accepted without question, not a surprise given that Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, was the Co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
The RNC’s acquiescence to Trump allowed him to adopt the most severe measures of the Project 2025 report without submitting them to a traditional debate within a president’s party.
Democrats, having no leverage in Congress, are not mounting a systematic response to this new Trump Civil Rights Era.
The reality is that Democrats cannot move any legislation through Congress without attracting at least several Republican House and Senate members. Consequently, individual Democratic members have threatened to take Hail-Mary efforts to block Trump’s executive orders.
Unfortunately, both parties have used presidential executive orders to get what they want without the other party’s support. So they have contributed to an executive-dominated government using those orders to accomplish tasks that would have been an act of Congress.
Democrats are baffled on how to mount an effective opposition. They hope that enough of the public will turn against the Trump administration as they lose critical services customarily provided by departments being effectively shut down.
Rather than relying on hope, Democrats need to go beyond challenging Trump’s MAGA agenda through a hopelessly compromised legislative process. They need to alter the mindset that Trump has successfully instilled in a plurality of voters that diversity is a threat to American freedoms.
