Donald Trump didn’t need to wait for the black box flight recorder. He knew what caused the mid-air collision of a passenger plane and army helicopter that killed 67 people. Or he thought he did.
“They actually came out with a directive – ‘too white’,” the US president told reporters on Thursday, seeking to blame former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for including Black and Latino people in the federal workforce. “We want the people that are competent.”
That it took Trump less than a day to exploit a tragic plane crash for his crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs should come as no surprise. The 78-year-old president is on a mission to win the “culture wars”, acting with speed and ferocity to bring his rightwing agenda into every corner of American life. It is a form of shock therapy that aims to rewire society itself.
Less than two weeks back in office, an emboldened, unapologetic Trump has launched a series of executive orders and policy changes that broadly target DEI, education curricula and political protests. The actions aim to reverse so-called “woke” policies and restore “merit-based” systems.
Trump said during a remote address to executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “My administration has taken action to abolish all discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense – and these are policies that were absolute nonsense – throughout the government and the private sector.”
The president has also moved to eliminate “radical gender ideology and critical race theory [CRT]” from the nation’s schools. He has targeted LGBTQ+ rights, making it official government policy that there are only two sexes while seeking to ban federal funding or support for youth gender-affirming care and ban transgender individuals from serving in the military.
Trump’s sledgehammer, aimed at smashing decades of progressive gains, has made a mockery of “We are not going back” – the slogan of his vanquished election opponent, Kamala Harris.
Chris Scott, a Democratic strategist who was Harris’s coalitions director, said: “What it has made clear is that a second Trump term is working to turn America back into pre-civil rights America during the Jim Crow era. That’s what we’re seeing with a lot of these policies.”
He added: “It is an absolutely terrifying time in this country. When we talk about ‘Make America Great Again’, a lot of folks understood what that means, particularly people of colour, particularly Black folks. We are on the precipice of going back, returning to our darkest times within this country.”
The culture wars went mainstream in the 1990s thanks to the conservative scholar James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. A year later, the conservative politician Pat Buchanan’s delivered a “culture war” speech at the Republican national convention, warning that the US was in a war for its soul against liberal forces.
Buchanan warned that, if Bill Clinton was elected, he would impose an agenda of “abortion on demand, a litmus test for the supreme court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units”. Clinton won and battles raged over LGBTQ+ rights, political correctness and censorship, and multiculturalism and immigration.
The conflict simmered during the 2000s and exploded again with the rise of Trump, Christian nationalism and social media echo chambers. In 2017 Trump was dubbed “the culture war president” by Politico magazine. He appointed three supreme court justices who helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion after half a century.
Dante King, a DEI expert, speaker and author, said: “Donald Trump has a platform. He has prioritised heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender white men and he is concerned with disenfranchising anyone who does not live up to or behaves based on the ideology, the ideals, the cultural customs and practices of white men.”
The left embraced movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. “Cancel culture” and transgender rights became new battlegrounds. An entire rightwing ecosystem thrived on not what they are for but what they are against. Terms such as wokeness, CRT and DEI were vilified to become rallying cries for rightwing mobilisation, portraying Democrats as out of touch with everyday concerns.
Randall Woodfin, a Democrat who is the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, said: “Unfortunately a small group of people have decided to weaponise the words diversity, equity and inclusion. They’ve been made to be bad but the truth is diversity, equity and inclusion at minimum are neutral terms and at best are part of the American values as a country.”
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Trump’s election victory last year took this hostility from the fringes to the Oval Office. Despite gaining less than 50% of the national popular vote, the 47th president believes he has a mandate to impose a fundamental cultural realignment, not by increments but with sudden and overwhelming force.
Trump’s administration has branded DEI initiatives in the federal government as “discriminatory”, “anti-American” and driven by a “far-left agenda”. He has ordered the elimination of all federal DEI programmes and related offices, placing staff on leave and removing related websites because they represent “immense public waste and shameful discrimination”.
The order directs the administration to review which federal contractors have provided DEI training materials to government agencies and revokes the Equal Employment Opportunity order signed in 1965 by Lyndon Johnson. Trump directed agencies to stop using gender identity or preferred pronouns. And federal workers have been told to report colleagues who may seek to continue DEI programmes.
There are signs that the assault is not confined to the government alone but seeping into wider society. Companies such as McDonald’s, Meta and Walmart have reportedly pulled back on DEI programmes in response to political pressure. It is a dramatic reversal from the diversity push that followed the police murder of George Floyd, an African American man, in Minneapolis in 2020.
Woodfin, author of the memoir Son of Birmingham, added: “Post-George Floyd being killed, corporate America decided to have a look in the mirror and say, ‘What can we do better?’ Conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion kept popping up and corporate America started making voluntary decisions that they were going to make this a priority.
“People have got to make a decision. Don’t get distracted by arguments over the initials. We’ve got to focus on the intent. The intent in a country like America is to create a more fair and just country for all Americans.”
Trump’s White House has moved to eliminate what it terms “indoctrination” from K-12 education and threatening to withdraw federal funding from schools that teach content deemed subversive. He is aiming to combat antisemitism on college campuses, promising to prosecute offenders and revoke visas for international students considered “Hamas sympathisers” based on their participation in pro-Palestinian protests.
The White House has reinstated an order from Trump’s first term establishing the 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education” in schools. Biden revoked the order and the commission’s guide for teaching history. The guide played down America’s role in slavery and argued that the civil rights movement infringed the “lofty ideals” espoused by the nation’s founders. It was widely panned by historians, who said it was outdated and ignored decades of research.
When America celebrates its 250th birthday next year, a likely flashpoint in the culture wars, Trump looks set to have the upper hand. Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, observed: “It is a continuum. It’s always, unfortunately, been rooted in division and fearing somebody who’s not like you or doesn’t believe like you or doesn’t love like you or doesn’t think like you. The irony is that is the actual opposite of a democracy.”
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