Triggernometry’s Konstantin Kisin, who goes to great pains to underline his own support for Ukraine resisting Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression, points out that it was Zelensky who screwed up big time in his White House meeting with Trump.
Since that disasterous meeting, of course, Zelensky has been singing a different tune, and may end up following Kisin’s advice and giving Trump everything he asked for. Stay tuned…
I’m a conservative who supports Donald Trump’s agenda, and also someone who opposes Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine and wants to see Ukraine win. But I’m not freaking out over Volodymyr Zelensky’s disasterous Oval Office meeting with Trump.
It’s like media and political observers who have been watching Trump for close decade are still flabbergasted when Trump does Trump things in a Trump way. Trump works on persuasion and negotiation framing and pursues a tit-for-tat game theory strategy: Cooperate with him and he’ll cooperate with you, attack him and he’ll attack you. Given those parameters, Zelensky played things exactly wrong.
The meeting between President Donald Trump, VP J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was nothing short of explosive, fantastic, and satisfying. So much so that America collectively need a smoke afterward.
The Democrats, however, seem to think Trump just beheaded a statue of Apollo and now the gods will be wrathful.
But besides watching an entitled brat of a world leader get raked over the coals by the guy from The Apprentice and a hillbilly millennial, Zelensky’s strategy was a head scratcher. Perhaps he was so used to American politicians who were willing to lay themselves down into puddles, so Zelensky wasn’t ready to talk to two dudes who don’t feel the need to perform for the media, which Vance seemed hyper-aware of, and pointed that out to Zelensky.
Perhaps he thought America owed him one, and thus his smug attitude, but as Bonchie noted in his article, this wasn’t wise:
Trump has never accepted the idea that Ukraine is doing the United States a favor by fighting Russia as a way of justifying unlimited aid. Perhaps Joe Biden found that argument persuasive, but Joe Biden is not in office anymore. Russia is not going to invade the United States or any NATO country (if for no other reason than a lack of capability), and using that as a type of blackmail for support was never going to play.
Actually, if Putin had succeeded in gobbling up Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (NATO countries all) would have become targets. The mauling Russia has received in Ukriane put that off the table, especially with Finland and Sweden now in NATO.
And herein we find the trump card that Trump had on Zelensky… you know, besides the money the world’s most successful beggar came to get.
Trump’s negotiation strategy vastly differs from many other American leaders, especially those on the Democrat side of the aisle. Despite Trump’s reputation as a rough-around-the-edges man whose political charm is far divorced from what people expect after watching The West Wing too much, he is a master negotiator.
Even when it comes to our enemies, Trump is not going to negotiate from a position of bad faith. He sees everything as a businessman would. There are no friends or foes while at the table, just good deals and bad deals.
I thought The Federalist CEO Sean Davis put this very well in a post he made on X:
Trump doesn’t bad mouth anyone who comes to the negotiating table in good faith. Ever. It’s a near-cardinal rule of negotiations for him, and a major reason he’s been such a successful dealmaker.
If you refuse to negotiate, he will trash you. If you lie or negotiate in bad faith, he will trash you. He has zero interest in allowing empty moralizing to get in the way of a deal that he wants.
He has done this his entire career, in business and in politics, and it’s fascinating to me how many people who think of themselves as smart and savvy are incapable of seeing or understanding this dynamic.
The key here isn’t just that Trump is holding the cards and that Zelensky needs him — not the other way around — it’s that Trump is negotiating from a fortified position of “America first.” Everything at the table is subject to that one point, and if anything drifts away from that, then Trump pushes back and pushes back until he’s all the way gone from the table.
Zelensky acted like a petulant child who showed no respect to the country that had given him the money for his war while trying to secure more, and Trump saw no value, not in the war, and not in Zelensky’s disrespect. As such, there was no deal. Moreover, Zelensky attempted to pressure Trump into capitulation through our own media, which was a costly mistake. Trump is not beholden to the American media as other leaders are.
Here’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio explaining how Zelensky screwed up in even blunter terms:
Clearly Zelensky screwed up. Ukraine needs America a whole lot more than America needs Ukraine. Europe’s help has been valuable, but they can’t supply Ukraine with Patriot missiles, HIMARS, and a dozen other high tech items from America’s vast arsenal that have been absolutely essential for fighting Russia to a standstill.
As incompetently as Russia has run this war, Ukraine has not made notable gains in taking back its occupied land since the Kharkiv Counteroffensive in 2022. Though Ukraine has considerably degraded Russia’s logistics, energy and industrial infrastructure, and the Kursk offensive has captured Russian land and tied up forces that can’t be used elsewhere, it hasn’t launched a real counterattack to recapture Ukrainian land since 2023. A stalemate that continues to destroy what’s left of Russia’s Soviet stockpiles is still helping NATO, but doesn’t do anything to advance Trump’s other foreign policy goals for America.
Clearly the Trump Administration is unhappy with the stalemate of the war, and it is naive to think that the United States would be willing to underwrite the continuance of the war for tens of billions of dollars indefinitely. Just as clearly, Zelensky took the wrong approach and made several blunders dealing with Trump.
I am optimistic that Zelensky and Ukraine can change their approach and come to an agreement with the Trump Administration. But that agreement will have to be on Trump’s terms, not Zelensky’s.
Just under a month into the Trump47 Administration, so much is going on so quickly that it can be hard to keep track. But one good bit of news is that border crossings are down dramatically in the first ten days of the second Trump Administration.
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of “mass deportations” and securing the southern border, and now CBP has released numbers showing the impact of his rhetoric and new measures put in place.
Between January 21 and January 31, Customs and Border Protection reports reveal an 85 percent decrease in apprehensions along the southwest border compared to the corresponding period in 2024.
The CBP report also details how in the 11 days following the termination of the CBP One app, inadmissible alien encounters at the border have fallen 93 percent, as compared to the 11 days prior.
“The reduction in illegal aliens attempting to make entry into the U.S., compounded by a significant increase in repatriations, means that more officers and agents are now able to conduct the enforcement duties that make our border more secure and our country safer,” CBP Commissioner Pete Flores stated.
FYI, CBP Commissioner Peter R. Flores is not the same person as Texas state senator Pete Flores (who is currently my state senator).
Furthermore, the White House detailed that CBP agents arrested 29,000 people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in January — the lowest tally since May 2020 — potentially signaling that the yearlong decline in crossings could persist under Trump if the executive orders continue to be enforced.
Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border was one of Trump’s first acts in office, along with restarting construction on the border wall, reviving the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, halting migrant parole programs, and cancelling the CBP One mobile application for asylum appointments.
85% and 93% are not a small amounts. Merely having Trump as President is enough to deter many would-be illegal aliens from crossing the border. It also goes to prove, once again, that the Biden Administration simply didn’t want to control the border.
This tweet from John Robb does a good job of explaining just how Trump and Musk operate:
The online maneuver warfare that Trump and Elon employ attacks the psychology of the opposition.
They use rapid maneuvers, fast transients (rapid shifts to new maneuvers), novelty, and feints (head fakes, etc.) to disorient, disrupt, and overload the opponent.
Their…
— John Robb (@johnrobb) February 5, 2025
The online maneuver warfare that Trump and Elon employ attacks the psychology of the opposition.
They use rapid maneuvers, fast transients (rapid shifts to new maneuvers), novelty, and feints (head fakes, etc.) to disorient, disrupt, and overload the opponent.
Annexing Greenland, Canada and Panama are all, I think, head fakes and feints, as is rebuilding Gaza.
Their effectiveness is amplified because the establishment’s decision-making loops are far slower than theirs (John Boyd) due to how the red tribe operates in parallel (the dynamics of open source networks).
These maneuvers freeze the establishment in place (deer in the headlights effect), making it impossible for them to think or decide for as long as it continues — you can see this happening right now.
Maneuver warfare, of course, is another term for blitzkrieg, a doctrine of warfare in which you move too fast for the enemy to react. You’re capturing Objective 5 while the enemy is just starting to respond to your capture of Objective 3. If you’re operating inside your enemy’s OODA loop, you are effectively inducing the equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
This is what’s happening to Democrats right now.
Their response seems to be to cling more tightly to ritual invocations of the same social justice warrior polices (child mutilation in the name of radical transsexism, DEI, opening the border to illegal alien criminals, etc.) that made them so deeply unpopular with American voters.
(Hat tip: The Daily Scroll via Tablet.)
It’s amazing what having a President dedicated to securing the border can help accomplish when he works with border state officials rather than against them.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has become the first Texas law enforcement official to sign an agreement with the Trump administration to carry out its mass deportation efforts.
On Sunday, Paxton’s office announced the move, less than two weeks after President Trump handed down an executive order authorizing state and local law enforcement entities to perform the functions of immigration officers.
The order is pursuant to section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which the White House claims allows the federal government to co-delegate “the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens.”
Section 287(g) was added to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1996 as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
“On day one, President Trump took bold action to make America safe again. I am proud to be the first to join him to restore our national sovereignty, secure our border, and ensure that criminal aliens face the justice they deserve,” stated Paxton. “As the top law enforcement official in Texas, I call on all agencies and departments to join me in the fight. We will enforce the law and protect America.”
Paxton’s agreement follows a January 29 executive order by Gov. Greg Abbott instructing “all appropriate state agencies to assist federal actors working under the direction of the Trump Administration with carrying out functions under federal immigration laws.”
Two days later, Abbott stated that his office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Texas National Guard continue to collaborate with the Trump administration on Operation Lone Star.
Abbott revealed to Breitbart on February 2 that he signed a memorandum of understanding between U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the State of Texas to grant Texas National Guard personnel the authority to make immigration arrests.
The order is “effective immediately” and “boosts man power for border security,” wrote Abbott in a post on X.
It’s going to take years (at a minimum) to clean up the illegal alien border mess that the lawless Biden regime left behind. But having a Presidential Administration in office that’s willing to enforce the law is a huge start.
It has been a hell of a week. First my contract position ended, then I came down with cold that’s had me drag-ass and expectorating for a few days, and my vet found “concerning” results in the blood work on my dog Avery. To balance this out, Trump has been on an absolute #winning tear as of late.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Summary of Savings From Headcount and Nondefense Agency Waste Reductions (FY 2029):
- 100% Elimination of Staffing at 16 Unnecessary Federal Agencies: $11 billion.
- 50% Staffing Cut at 9 Dubious Federal Agencies: $15 billion.
- 34% Staff Reduction at All Other Nondefense Departments: $59 billion.
- Indirect Overhead savings from nondefense staff reductions and agency eliminations: $45 billion.
- Total Nondefense Staff and Overhead Savings: $130 billion.
We begin with a summary of the 16 agencies to be shut down, along with the number of staff positions to be eliminated and the resulting direct employee compensation savings. These agencies are slated for complete elimination because in the context of a roaring fiscal crisis, they are either utterly unnecessary or inappropriate functions of government or comprise activities that are already being handled by other Federal agencies, state and local governments, or the private sector.
Self-evidently, these 16 agency closures would result in only a small down payment against the $2 trillion per year savings goal. Yet it is crucial to start here because each of these agencies represent cases of egregious regulatory excess or Washington-based enterprises that are not remotely the business of the central government in any season, but most especially not during a time when the Federal government is careening toward the fiscal shoals.
Stated differently, the list below comprises a kind of Litmus Test of fiscal resolve.
If these Federal bureaucrats and agencies can’t be eliminated, the prospect for reining in America’s unfolding fiscal calamity is dim indeed.
16 Agencies To Be Eliminated–Staff Cuts and Payroll Savings:
- National Endowment for the Arts: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
- National Endowment for the Humanities: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
- Legal Services Corporation: 800 staff and $128 million savings.
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): 600 staff and $96 million savings.
- Federal Trade Commission (FTC): 1,125 staff and $180 million savings.
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
- OSHA: 2,200 staff and $352 million savings.
- Consumer Products Safety Commission: 600 staff and $96 million savings.
- Agency for Global Media: 1,125 staff and $180 million of savings.
- National Endowment for Democracy (NED): 162 staff and $26 million savings.
- Education Department: 4,245 staff and $680 million savings.
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 1,500 staff and $240 million savings.
- Agency for International Development (AID): 10,000 staff and $1.6 billion savings.
- FBI: 34,000 staff and $5.4 billion savings.
- BATF: 5,300 staff and $848 million savings.
- DEA: 9,315 staff and $1.49 billion savings.
Total 16 Agencies To Be Eliminated: 71,000 staff and $11.3 billion savings.
You’re just getting started…
#1 Joe Biden and his minions spent 15 million dollars to distribute “oral contraceptives and condoms” in Afghanistan…
The Biden administration sent $15 million of taxpayer money in distributing “oral contraceptives and condoms” into Afghanistan, according to a private congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The award, earmarked by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) last July, transmitted the funds to Afghanistan.
The money was part of a whopping $100 million package for the Middle Eastern country to support the “basic rights and freedoms” of women and girls who were living under Taliban rule.
#2 Even more money was about to be spent on condoms for the Palestinians. It is being reported that the Biden administration “almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza”…
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also announced on Tuesday that Biden’s administration almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, which she called ‘a preposterous waste of taxpayer money!’
‘There was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza!’ Leavitt shockingly claimed.
#3 The Biden administration spent $10,000 for an “ice skating drag show” that was focused on climate change…
The 2024 Festivus Waste Report found that the Biden-Harris administration spent over $1 trillion this year, including giving a $10,000 grant to “Beards on Ice” — an ice skating drag show on climate change put on by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, a self-described “queer cabaret arts organization.”
#4 20 million of our tax dollars were spent on a Sesame Street spin-off in Iraq that was designed to promote “inclusion”…
Additionally, the Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $20 million on a Sesame Street spin-off show in Iraq, titled “Ahlan Simsim,” in an effort to promote “inclusion” and “mutual respect.”
#5 This final example is the most sickening. 1.5 million dollars was spent to study how various species respond to motion sickness. In one of the experiments, holes were actually drilled into the skulls of young kittens. This is evil on a level that I don’t even know how to describe…
About $1.5 million was spent experimenting how different species, such as young female kittens, respond to motion sickness.
According to the report, researchers would strap kittens to a table, where they are spun around in several directions and have holes drilled into their skulls to keep them in place — “and it’s all being done with your money,” Paul writes in the report. “More than one and a half million dollars of it.”
The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.
In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.
Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?
I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.
Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:
In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.
The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.
Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….
Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.
Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.
Instead of helping the Democratic Party, the massive influx of Hispanic illegal aliens is dooming it:
Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:
Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.
Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.
And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Predictably, this dramatic surge in illegal immigration and the diffusion of immigrants into overburdened cities countrywide caused a spike in the issue’s salience and negative sentiment toward Biden and the Democrats for letting the situation get out of control (where it remains to this day). In voters’ view, this was very poor governance indeed.
Leonhardt identifies the ideological roots of the Democrats’ cavalier attitude toward border security and tolerance of illegal immigration:
To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin…
In the 2000s, the Democratic Party…moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record. Many liberals have grown uncomfortable talking about restrictions and criticize both Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions. Obama combined full-throated support for immigrants, including legalization for many who were undocumented, with support for border security. When “an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers,” Obama said, it violates America’s promise.
Top Democrats would not make such an argument today. They are also unlikely to revere assimilation, as [Barbara] Jordan [black Texas Democrat, who chaired a 1990s commission on immigration policy] did. To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic…
Today, immigration is the one issue on which even the left flank of the Democratic Party continues to support the neoliberal position. Democrats have grown more skeptical of deregulation and the free flow of trade than they were during the Clinton years. But they have grown even more supportive of the deregulated flow of people across borders. Many liberals are passionately universalist on the subject….
Because of this discomfort [with deciding who should be legally admitted to the country and who should not], the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.
There you have it. Democrats have developed a philosophy about immigration that prizes ideological commitments over the mundane realities of a secure border, public order and enforcement of the law. Until Democrats decisively reject that philosophy and show by their actions that they are committed to stopping illegal immigration with every tool at government’s disposal and restoring order to the immigration system, voters will continue to regard Democratic governance in this area as very poor indeed. And who can blame them?
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
According to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida, a 39-year-old Orlando man named Matthew A. Inman has been arrested and charged with “transportation of child sex abuse material.” If convicted, he’ll face between five and twenty years in jail. Though when you hear the details, you may agree with me that this doesn’t seem like nearly enough time behind bars for this guy.
The press release continues:
According to the complaint, between August and October of 2024, Inman received and saved several videos of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to his phone. These videos depicted adults sexually assaulting young children. In October 2024, Inman traveled to Las Vegas and began talking online with an undercover law enforcement officer posing as the father of a 9-year-old boy. During this conversation, Inman expressed interest in meeting and sexually assaulting the purported child. He also sent CSAM videos to the undercover officer.
The FBI obtained a search warrant for Inman’s electronic devices and residence. During the execution of the search warrant, Inman attempted to delete the evidence from his phone and hide in the attic of his house.
A criminal complaint is merely a formal charge that a defendant has committed one or more violations of federal criminal law, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless, and until, proven guilty.
This case was investigated by the FBI. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Richard Varadan.
According to Spectrum News 13, “Inman was arrested by the U.S. Marshals, and he is currently in the Seminole County Jail with no bond.”
Fox 35 in Orlando reports that Inman worked for Visit Orlando, according to his LinkedIn profile. He served as the manager of business affairs. He’s also been the treasurer for the Orange County Democratic Party since July 2023 and president of the Rainbow Democrats since 2021.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Trump approval currently has NO racial demographic signal. Wild!
White – 55%
Black – 57%
Hisp/oth – 58%— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@Mark_R_Mitchell) January 23, 2025
What makes Bob Menendez a true legend of New Jersey politics is how he spent years fighting federal criminal charges, beat them, and then turned around and got right back to crimin' again the instant he did. The man was *committed* to his grift. It was in his heart all along.
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) January 29, 2025
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
As I mentioned last week, my contract position did end, so I’m between jobs again. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
More winning coming down the pike, as President Trump started dismantling the federal government’s entire DEI apparatus.
The Trump administration took a sledgehammer to progressive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives Tuesday night with executive orders designed to root racialist ideology out of the federal government and American institutions at large.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order overturning President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order creating race-based hiring requirements for federal contractors. Paired with that is a memo from the office of personnel management placing all DEI employees on leave and shutting down DEI programs and offices.
LBJ’s executive order was clearly unconstitutional and counter to the founder’s vision of individual equality under the law, but was thought at the time to be a necessary expedient to overcome decade of Jim Crow discrimination against black Americans. But there are few things more permanent than a “temporary” government program. Rescinding LBJ’s racist edict was long overdue, but expect the withered vine of Never-Trumpers to scream about “mah sacred norms and practices!” (At least I’m assuming that’s what they’re screeching. There’s too much real news to bother hunting for their reflexive pearl-clutching reactions. If a tree grifts in a forest when no one is around, does it make a sound?)
“President Trump campaigned on ending the scourge of DEI from our federal government and returning America to a merit based society where people are hired based on their skills, not for the color of their skin.
I seem to remember hearing a quote like this before.
This is another win for Americans of all races, religions, and creeds. Promises made, promises kept,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
In addition to overturning affirmative action for contractors, Trump’s executive order declares DEI illegal and advises corporations and federally funded universities to end all illegal discrimination, with DEI falling under that umbrella.
Likewise, Trump took action to rid the Federal Aviation Administration of DEI hiring practices and return the agency to a merit-based system. Trump instructed the Secretary of Transportation and FAA administrator to end preferential hiring protocols for certain demographic criteria and revoke DEI programming inside the agency.
On Monday, Trump’s first day in office, he signed executive orders directing agencies to terminate DEI programs and review employment practices to root out DEI in all its forms. He also repealed the Biden administration’s “equity” executive order for the federal workforce and other executive actions meant to advance “equity” for minority groups.
Live by executive order, die by executive order. Die, DEI.
Trump’s executive actions have the potential to significantly reshape federal civil rights law and could spell the end of DEI across American institutions. Large corporations, elite universities, news organizations, and many other powerful facets of American business and culture adopted DEI during the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots and racial reckoning.
It was a grossly stupid and irresponsible decision then and it’s completely indefensible now.
Over the past few years, conservatives have waged a legal and political battle against DEI that started gaining traction after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that race-based college admissions programs violated the 14th Amendment. Conservative groups have filed a flurry of lawsuits alleging that corporate DEI programs violate anti-discrimination laws by explicitly creating programs for people with certain racial and gender characteristics.
And numerous courts have frequently and correctly ruled against such discriminatory behavior.
Numerous red states have also passed legislation outlawing DEI from universities and other public institutions.
More broadly, conservatives believe DEI programs obsessively focus on people’s immutable characteristics and assign blame to certain groups, rather than prioritizing individual character and meritocracy. DEI practitioners and proponents assert that it is necessary to make up for historical injustices to support people from marginalized backgrounds and train others to hold their same views.
Prior to Trump’s resounding electoral victory this past November, several large corporations including John Deere, Tractor Supply, Ford, and Lowe’s walked back DEI initiatives following conservative pressure. The slow corporate retreat from DEI continues after the election, with McDonald’s and Meta being among the companies to abandon DEI ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
Hopefully Trump’s executive order will spark the end of DEI’s slow retreat and begin its swift and complete rout.