Trump Delivers on His Promise to Dismantle DEI

By Jason L. Riley

Wall Street Journal

January 21, 2025

Donald Trump’s Second Inaugural Address may not have been one for the ages, but it did meet the moment in at least one crucial respect. The president wants to pivot from his predecessor’s obsession with racial differences, as do millions of Americans of all political stripes.



In his Inaugural Address four years ago, Joe Biden prattled on about “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” and “a cry for racial justice.” Meeting these challenges, he said, “requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: unity.” A short time later, Mr. Biden issued an executive order on the importance of “racial equity” and “support for underserved communities through the federal government.”

Racial equity used to mean equal treatment regardless of race, but it’s become a progressive euphemism for group preferences. In practice, it means discriminating to achieve racial balance. Mr. Biden, invoking George Floyd’s death in 2020, said that “this nation and this government need to change their whole approach to the issue of racial equity” and make it “not just an issue for any one department of government. It has to be the business of the whole of government.”

For the past four years, that’s exactly what transpired. Federal agencies were directed to “implement or increase the availability” of diversity, equity and inclusion programs surrounding race as well as “gender identity.” Chief diversity officers established “agency equity teams” and submitted annual DEI progress reports. The federal Office of Personnel Management warned that the “intentional use of an incorrect name or pronoun (or both) could, in certain circumstances, contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment.” Major laws, including the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, included special benefits for ethnic minorities.

Upon assuming office Monday, Mr. Trump announced that he would put a stop to these efforts, which he believes have been detrimental to national unity. He thanked minority voters for “the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote” and said that “I will not forget it.” Yet he also vowed to pursue race- and gender-neutral policies in his second term. “I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” the president said. “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit based. As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”

Later in the day Mr. Trump signed an executive order that effectively reversed the Biden administration’s DEI directives. It calls for the “termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” Many progressive activists and media elites are no doubt horrified. But for everyday Americans, this is common sense. Changing the targets of government discrimination won’t undo the past. It will simply add to the number of people who have been treated unjustly in this country.

It’s no surprise that increasing the salience of race, and favoring some groups over others, can only harm the social cohesion necessary to sustain a multiethnic society. A Gallup poll released last week found that a plurality of Americans (39%) said that race relations had worsened under Mr. Biden, versus just 24% who said they had improved. Moreover, even fewer respondents (22%) said that the “situation for black people” had improved during the Biden presidency, while 34% said blacks had lost ground.

The evidence has been piling up that the country wants to move past race in ways that the political left continues to resist. The Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 ruling against racial preferences in college admissions didn’t go over well with liberals, but polls show that a large majority of Americans, including most blacks, view the decision favorably.

Writing in the Atlantic recently, George Packer urged fellow liberals to retire the notion that “identity is political destiny.” For decades, he noted, Democrats have told themselves that as “the country turned less white, it would inevitably turn more blue.” According to Mr. Packer, the 2024 election “exploded” that illusion. “Nearly half of Latinos and a quarter of Black men voted for Trump,” he wrote. “In New York City he did better in Queens and the Bronx, which have majority nonwhite populations, than in Manhattan, with its plurality of wealthy white people.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly outmaneuvered his political opponents on illegal immigration. He may be in the process of doing the same thing when it comes to race relations and the left’s identity-politics mania.

Appeared in the January 22, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Delivers on His Promise to Dismantle DEI'.