Home Donald Trump, with his anti-DEI orders, has us, again, fighting over the crumbs
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Donald Trump, with his anti-DEI orders, has us, again, fighting over the crumbs

Chris Graham
donald trump maga
(© Christian David Cooksey – Shutterstock)

DEI – diversity, equity, inclusion – is “immoral,” per Donald Trump, a White man born into millions whose father bought him an Ivy League degree and gave him a $400 million head start in the business world.

Interesting word choice there: “immoral.”

Note: that’s coming from a guy with 34 felony fraud convictions and hundreds of millions of dollars of judgments for fraud and defamation.

The lack of self-awareness with Donald Trump here: stunning.


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So, we have this guy who was born on third base and thinks it was because he hit a triple claiming he wants everybody else to have to compete in a thumb-on-the-scale meritocracy that benefits the already-advantaged, like him.

“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. This is another win for Americans of all races, religions and creeds. Promises made, promises kept,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday.

Bless her heart


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Leavitt was speaking there in defense of the executive order signed by Trump on Monday terminating “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

I love the language in the statement from our taxpayer-funded PR flunky there: “people are hired based on their skills, not for the color of their skin”; that’s adorable, coming from somebody working for Donald Trump, who pretends to be a self-made man, though his only skill is being born into wealth.

A follow-up executive order from that guy revoked a directive dating back to Lyndon B. Johnson that required government contractors to adopt nondiscriminatory practices in hiring and employment, if you were wondering what is really motivating Trump’s thinking here.

He’s back in the White House because he convinced White people that Blacks, Latinos and LGBTQs are getting all the good jobs because of DEI, when in reality all we’ve been trying to do as a society for the past, what, 60 years, is giving everybody a fair shot at the good-paying jobs.

And let’s be real here


Trump’s history tells us that he doesn’t care if anybody gets a good-paying job, as long as he’s taken care of.

The family wealth that he was born into was the result of the paterfamilias, Fred Trump, skimming money from federal-government affordable-housing projects meant to benefit GIs returning from World War II, and he built on his ill-gotten profit margins by stiffing his employees at every opportunity.

Donald Trump learned at the feet of the master on that, and he’s been stiffing the people who did the work on the few buildings he was actually able to see to completion for decades.


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Pro tip: that’s how you cook the books to get out from under multiple bankruptcies.

What he’s really doing here with these executive orders is giving preference with our tax dollars to his cronies so that they can fleece the federal treasury the way his father did to make his mint.

This hurts us, not helps us


I get it, that it does me no good to call foul on this, because it is what it is – this is the law of the land for the next four years.

Just need you to know, this is setting all of us back – not just the Black folks, Latinos, Asians, women, LGBTQs, who can now, again, be legally discriminated against in terms of hiring and the awards of federal contracts.

We’re all better off if we’re all better off – if we’re all able to be the best versions of who we can be.


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I’m a White male, but I’m also the product of a hardscrabble background – born to teen parents, grew up in a rural trailer park in a single-parent household on food stamps and free school lunches.

Say all you want that I got out on merit, but I had to work a million times harder than kids who grew up in middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds in Northern Virginia just to get the same opportunities – and a lot of the kids that I grew up with who could and should be doing more are less than they should be just because the obstacles were too high.

Because of what I’ve experienced, I have at least a tiny bit of insight into how hard it can be to have the deck stacked against you if you’re an ethnic or racial minority, or your obstacles are being a woman in a society that doesn’t view women as equals, or an LGBTQ in a world that would rather that you don’t even exist.

If all of us – rural whites, Blacks and Latinos and Asians, women and LGBTQs – can be the best version of us that we can be, that makes America better.

The real motivation to what Trump is doing


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What Donald Trump is selling about DEI being “immoral” is a throwback to the racial and gender politics of the Old South, where the political elites exploited rural Whites by making them believe that their enemy was Blacks who wanted to come take their jobs, and not the elites who wanted to keep both poor Whites and Blacks in a box so that they could exploit them as cheap labor.

There’s a straight line here from slavery to Jim Crow to Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy to the Reagan Democrats all the way to today’s MAGA.

DEI is, was – past tense, for now – a small concession to trying to address the massive wealth and income inequality that the infamous Reagan tax cuts wrought.

Fact: the top 1 percent now hold more than 30 percent of the wealth; the bottom 50 percent hold 2.6 percent.

DEI is crumbs.

Trump, by making what ails us as a country being about DEI, has us fighting over the crumbs, while the wealthy elites grab more and more from the bounty.

Video: Trump guts DEI


Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," a zero-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and a member of zero Halls of Fame, is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].