No one has ever accused Donald Trump of being deep, nuanced and petty subtle. But then, no rational person believes that the avalanche of Executive Orders marked with a sharpie come from the mushy-minded Trump. The “tell” is that they aren’t in all caps, use big words spelled correctly and are generally coherent. Someone came up with all these ideas, save the silliness of renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, and Trump is channeling his best Governor William J. Le Petomane.

Among the proclamations are two Executive Orders seeking to eradicate, overnight, the dreaded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion machinery that have properly come under fire for their infusion of race and sex discrimination under the woke guise of remediating past discrimination by exploiting current discrimination. The Supreme Court says no. Americans say no. Even those it was putatively supposed to help say no. So what’s not to like?

These reactions reflect the fact that diversity programs in the workplace and on campus have come under intensive criticism in recent years, both for enforcing progressive groupthink and for substituting pseudo-progressive verbiage for meaningful change. The New York Times, which the Trumpian right regards as the Pravda of the Democratic left, reported a year ago that many companies were backing away from more controversial DEI initiatives such as mandatory anti-bias trainings that can turn into hectoring and struggle sessions. More recently, the Times also ran a long investigative article on the polarizing and demoralizing effects of an aggressive DEI initiative at the University of Michigan. And a Gallup poll in January 2024 found that more than two-third of Americans, including more than half of black Americans, approved of the Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action—i.e., the explicit consideration of race—in college admissions.

Like Cathy Young, I share the view that DEI, as conceived and as it grew into an institutional monster, was destructive and counterproductive on a great many levels, not the least of which was to foster racial divisiveness that made the ultimate goal of a colorblind society, a phrase that morphed from a liberal goal to a progressive nightmare, that no longer tolerated discrimination an impossibility. The cure for racism isn’t more racism. The fix for hatred isn’t more hatred. The solution for inequality isn’t inequity.

But Cathy Young recognizes that it’s not quite as simple as scribbling with a sharpie. Identifying a problem, and DEI was, indeed, a problem, does not make its simplistic prohibition the solution. There’s always the syllogism.

Something must be done.
This is something.
This must be done.

Cathy raised some of the potential, if not likely, problems created by beating DEI to death with a cudgel rather than taking a scalpel to the mess.

The first anti-DEI executive order also directs agencies to assess “the number of new DEI hires” under the previous administration. Even the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, a civil liberties group critical of ‘wokeness’ which has expressed strong support for Trump’s “efforts to eliminate identity-based practices,” cautions that this demand “may invite speculation, without a firm basis or evidence, regarding an employee’s skills, abilities, or merit and instead make assumptions based on their perceived identity.” In other words, female and nonwhite staffers may be especially likely to be targeted as “DEI”—not an unlikely scenario when attacking women and minorities as “DEI” beneficiaries has already become a staple of right-wing rhetoric.

Her point wasn’t that ending the blight of DEI wasn’t the right policy, but that ending it carefully, with recognition that there are plenty of black people, plenty of women, plenty of gay people, hired not because of any DEI initiative, but because they were the best people for the job. Firing people because of their identities is no less outrageous than hiring them because of their identities. Distinguishing between the two takes time, thought and effort. For this, Chris Rufo lost his mind.

You’re a truly repulsive person, inside and out, and your presence in the discourse is a form of intellectual pollution. You’re a nagging schoolmarm who hasn’t realized that the children you’re constantly chastising have all grown up. They don’t need you and don’t respect you.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 24, 2025

To be fair, Rufo took the lead against DEI at a time when challenging it was anathema, and anyone risking a challenge was a pariah. Granted he became increasingly extreme over time, but that was unsurprising given the extremes to which his haters went. But then, Cathy wasn’t calling Rufo ugly, or even his antagonism toward DEI wrong. Rather, she called for greater thoughtfulness in the implementation of its elimination. Was that such a terrible thing to do?

I responded to these stupid arguments from the “classical liberals” between 2020 and 2024. I won. They lost. I’m not going to relitigate them now.

It’s understandable why the hardcore MAGA folks lack the ability to grasp the almost certain problems arising from the shallow and ham-handed imposition of Rufo’s “win” against DEI. It’s not that Trump is wrong to excise DEI from the body politic, but that removing a cancer without killing the patient requires surgical skill. It’s likely that Chris Rufo is one of, if not “the,” moving power behind Trump’s Executive Orders, and was the guy who made sure the letters were all in the right order, his outraged rejection of any criticism, any scrutiny, now that the scheme is being executed, by calling the person offering such mild critique “repulsive.” Is he really just as petty and fragile as his patron?

For those who support Trump not because they don’t realize what a vulgar, deceitful, narcissistic ignoramus he is, but because they nonetheless prefer him to the alternative, it’s critically important that he not blow up the nation in the process of eliminating the vestiges of wokeness. To do this, Trump’s EOs need to be subject to criticism and Chris Rufo needs to stop being so absurdly mean-spirited and take criticism like a big boy.