The slogan that immediately comes to mind is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but as Cathy Young explains, it ain’t necessarily so. After President Trump signed an Executive Order prohibiting “race and sexual stereotyping” for federal employees and contractors, opponents praised the effort, even if not otherwise fans of Trump.

But if one agrees that these trainings are bad and often toxic, even if some of them aren’t quite as terrible as reported — at best, studies seem to show that they are ineffective — does that mean Trump’s order to stamp them out in the federal workforce is a victory?

There are several good reasons the answer is no.

The rationale is twofold, that right-wing criticism of Critical Race Theory could serve to encourage it in state and local governments headed by Democrats, but more importantly, that supporting Trump’s Executive Order prohibiting it in the federal government will give rise to a knee-jerk reaction by those who despise Trump to either become acolytes of CRT or, if already inclined towards it, become even more entrenched. The slogan about “enemies” cuts both ways.

But the problem isn’t that Trump has managed to end up on the right side of an issue for once, but that he’s become the new face of the issue.

Moderator Chris Wallace asked President Trump during last week’s debate why he “directed federal agencies to end racial-sensitivity training that addresses white privilege or critical race theory.” Mr. Trump answered: “I ended it because it’s racist.” Participants “were asked to do things that were absolutely insane,” he explained. “They were teaching people to hate our country.”

“Nobody’s doing that,” Joe Biden replied. He’s wrong.

Christopher Rufo wrote of what happened at a diversity training session at Sandia National Labs.

At the Sandia National Laboratories, which develops technology for America’s nuclear arsenal, executives held a racially segregated training session for white male employees. The three-day event, which was led by a company called White Men as Full Diversity Partners, set the goal of examining “white male culture” and making the employees take responsibility for their “white privilege,” “male privilege” and “heterosexual privilege.” In one of the opening exercises, the instructors wrote on a whiteboard that “white male culture” can be associated with “white supremacists,” “KKK,” “Aryan Nation,” “MAGA hat” and “mass killings.” On the final day, the trainers asked employees to write letters to women and people of color. One participant apologized for his privilege and another pledged to “be a better ally.”

As Cathy notes, there were other things on the white board as well that were entirely anodyne, suggesting that it wasn’t as bad as Rufo made it out to be. What could be wrong about criticizing white supremacy, after all?

At a series of events at the Treasury Department and federal financial agencies, diversity trainer Howard Ross taught employees that America was “built on the backs of people who were enslaved” and that all white Americans are complicit in a system of white supremacy “by automatic response to the ways we’re taught.”

You may agree with this or not, but the question is whether this should be required training for white federal employees, to be taught they serve a nation that is inherently and irredeemably racist and sexist, and they are too.

To any fair-minded observer, these are not “racial sensitivity trainings,” as Mr. Wallace described them at the debate. They are political indoctrination sessions.

Georgetown prawf, Paul Butler, however, proves the point that Cathy made. In a WaPo op-ed, given the catchy title “In Trump’s bizarro world of White resentment, calling out racism is itself racist,” Butler inextricably ties opposition to Critical Race Theory to its critic-in-chief.

It’s possible that Trump had not heard of critical race theory before conservative media harped on it. This effort is of a piece with his unusually transparent exploitation of racial grievance as he campaigns. He recently retweeted a post that said, “Sorry liberals! How to be Anti-White 101 is permanently cancelled!”

Ironically, Trump’s Trumpian swipe at “liberals” is very much the crux of the problem. Few things are as contrary to liberal principles as CRT, which Butler benignly, and falsely, trivializes while tying to Trump.

In the bizarro world of White resentment — where Trump is certainly commander in chief — acknowledging racism is itself racist. In this view, the problem isn’t just sensitivity training that veers into political correctness.

In the CRT view, efforts to eradicate racism up to now have failed, and so a new approach is needed.

Critical race theory is an intellectual movement that started on law campuses and spread to history, education and sociology departments, among others. It began as an effort to understand why, decades after civil rights had been granted to African Americans, things had not much improved.

Have they “not much improved,” or have they improved significantly, even if there remains more to do? Can further progress be made by continuing to pursue the eradication of racism, or does it require that people manufacture generic complaints of racism in every aspect of life and demand they be “cured” by affirmative anti-racism, whether white self-loathing or violence in service of this secular religion?

While liberal principles would both acknowledge and seek to eliminate racism, CRT seeks to replace old racism with new racism. The theory is grounded in the redefinition of racism as “racism plus power,” meaning that only white people can be racist since they are the powerful and black people are the oppressed, and the oppressed can’t be racist toward the powerful.

The Proud Boys could not have better engineered this takeover of federal training.

And that’s what’s wrong with Trump leading a charge against CRT, thus making the “enemy of my enemy my friend.” It’s not that Trump is wrong, this time, but that associating something that’s right with Trump means tainting it with his associations and idiotic rhetoric. There is nothing about white supremacy that isn’t anathema to a liberal, and yet here Butler is, tying any opposition to CRT to the Proud Boys via Trump.

There is racism. Not everything is racism. There are racists. Not everyone is racist. We need to recognize, acknowledge and eliminate racism, but we don’t need to manufacture rationalizations to turn every banal aspect of our existence into some existential racist trauma. No, we do not need to replace one form of racism with another. Trump may have gotten this one right, but he’s not your friend, and you do not want him to be your ally in any battle involving principles.