Donald Trump does not care about merit.
If he cared about merit, then Pete Hegseth — a former Fox News host who has been accused of having a history of alcohol abuse and professional malfeasance — would not be secretary of defense. If he cared about merit, then JD Vance — with even less experience than one of his least experienced predecessors, Dan Quayle — would not be vice president of the United States. And if he cared about merit, then neither Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nor Kash Patel would be a hair’s breadth away from serving as secretary of health and human services or director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Trump does not care about merit, but he talks about merit all the time. It is the key term in his war on diversity, equity and inclusion policies, or D.E.I. But if Trump does not care about actual merit then what, exactly, is he going on about? What is “merit” and what is an anti-meritocratic D.E.I. policy?
Trump gave us one answer last week when he revoked a 60-year-old nondiscrimination order and shut down civil rights enforcement at the Justice Department. He gave us another when he issued an executive order mandating “patriotic education” and taking aim at any teaching that dwells on this country’s troubled history of racial hierarchy and subordination. He gave us another answer on Wednesday when Secretary Hegseth paused military recognition of Black History Month as part of his effort to uproot D.E.I. and show that “diversity is not our strength.” And Trump gave us one more, during a Thursday news conference, when both he and Vice President Vance blamed diversity for the midair collision near Washington National Airport that claimed 67 lives the night before.
“We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system,” Trump said. “Only the highest aptitude, they have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers.” He then went on to complain, falsely, that the Federal Aviation Administration under President Joe Biden and his transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, was “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.”
Further abusing the truth, Trump said that the F.A.A. had “determined that the work force was too white,” but, he continued, “we want the people that are competent.”
Vance also told reporters that the government under Biden had turned away potential air traffic controllers “because of the color of their skin” and that the push for diversity in government “put stresses on the people who are already there,” presumably leading them to make mistakes.
Neither the president nor the vice president (nor the secretary of defense, who made similar comments) gave any evidence to support the bizarre assertion that diversity efforts caused the tragic accident. They made no attempt to show that either the pilots or air traffic controllers were unqualified or unprepared — although air traffic control at Ronald Reagan National Airport was understaffed.
But in the mind of the president and his deputy, the mere fact of diversity is evidence of incompetence and unfair treatment. To have women or nonwhites or people with disabilities in sensitive roles, says the president, is to necessarily court disaster.
What does D.E.I. mean to the president and his administration? It’s the presence — in a skilled or high-status role — of anyone who isn’t white, male and able-bodied, regardless of qualifications or abilities. And on the other end, in the Orwellian formulation of the president and his allies, it is meritocracy to bestow the highest public trust on men like Hegseth, who have, if nothing else, the right look.
This is run-of-the-mill discrimination, of the kind we tried to banish to the ash heap of history with the Civil Rights Act. And it is part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to subordinate large groups of Americans under rigid hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality, from the attack on diversity to the frighteningly authoritarian assault on the lives and livelihoods of transgender Americans.
It has been long out of use in American political life, but we do have a word for the kind of people who practice this sort of politics: segregationist. Remember, segregation did not necessarily mean that Black and white Americans could not work together or inhabit the same public space — that would have been impossible, given the actual social relations of the Jim Crow South. What it meant was the rigid maintenance of an explicit hierarchy, along with the racial distribution of resources and respect.
That is what the administration seems to want. The distribution of resources and respect along lines of race, gender and ability. Seen in this light, the president’s move to end D.E.I. is of a piece with Woodrow Wilson’s successful effort, in his first administration, to resegregate the federal work force.
We saw, at this news conference, explicit racism and bigotry of a kind that even the most prejudiced presidents usually kept from public view. As chief executive, Trump has a duty to represent the entire country and affirm the basic American value that “all men are created equal.” But at that news conference, he refused.
Once again, and not for the last time, Donald Trump has disgraced and degraded his office. But then, what else is new? We knew what he was when we took him in.
What I Wrote
I wrote my column this week on President Trump’s effort to subvert the basic structure of constitutional government in the United States.
To upset this balance of power — to give the president, in effect, the power of the purse — is to unravel the constitutional system in its entirety. A Congress that cannot force the executive to abide by its spending decisions is a Congress whose power of the purse is a nullity and whose spending laws are little more than a batch of recommendations.
I also joined my editor Aaron Retica on The Opinions podcast to talk about Trump, William McKinley and the politics of the late 19th century.
Now Reading
Victor Ray on the assault on D.E.I. for The Emancipator:
Behind the anti-diversity movement’s performative worries about qualification is a not-so-subtle subtext implying that any person of color in a position of authority is unqualified. … Claims that D.E.I. means “Didn’t Earn It” is one way people signal their support for old-school racism while avoiding the sanction of using open slurs. Couching bigotry in concern about “qualifications” (which only seems to apply to nonwhite people) is just the socially acceptable way to launder racist disdain.
Alan Elrod on the political power of status anxiety for The Bulwark:
Theirs is a pain the president can feel. Trump is the master of grievance and animus precisely because he himself is an exposed nerve of status anxiety. No one articulates this sense of injury quite like him because perhaps no one is as covetous, spiteful and achingly needy as he is. His unprecedented political debut and continuing success has not freed him from his decades-old grievances. If anything, his elevation has made him into the ultimate sore winner.
Adam Serwer on the stakes of transgender rights for all Americans for The Atlantic:
The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to re-establish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing L.G.B.T.Q. people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of — as Trump once put it — “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.”
Evan D. Bernick on the “anti-constitutional attack on birthright citizenship” for the Law and Political Economy Project:
None of what the Trump administration is doing is accidental. It is downstream of a constitutionalism that resembles that of the antebellum period. That reactionary constitutionalism is defined by unchecked power over racialized populations which are deemed unfit to govern themselves. Scholars who suggest that arguments for the constitutionality of the order deserve a serious hearing are — whether they realize it or not — providing cover for the enemies of the 14th Amendment, and indeed of republican freedom. These arguments have been heard for far too long. They should not be heard again.
Caitlin Zaloom on the political influence of economists for The New York Review of Books.
Economic power is difficult to perceive because it has become the very language of governance, the sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman contends. Considering the U.S. in the 1960s through the 1980s, her book “Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy” focuses not on economists’ theories but on the much wider spread of an “economic style of reasoning.” This way of thinking assumes that social ills such as failing health systems, environmental hazards and corporate concentration can be avoided or alleviated by increasing competition among producers, expanding choices for consumers and nudging both groups with incentives. This rhetoric of market efficiency insulates economic policies from political debate, Berman argues, and avoids messy conversations about decisions that favor the interests of certain races, classes and geographic areas over others.
Photo of the Week
One last photo from my trip to Greece last summer. If you want to see more than what I’ve shared here, check out my photo blog.
Now Eating: Frijoles Borrachos (Drunken Beans)
This, to me, is the ultimate comfort meal. A big bowl of warm, flavorful beans with fresh garnishes (diced white onion, cilantro, radishes) and either warm flour tortillas or cornbread. Feel free to omit the bacon if you’d like, although I think it’s worth the indulgence. Recipe comes from NYT Cooking.
Ingredients
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1 pound dried pinto beans
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5 slices thick-cut bacon, thinly sliced crosswise
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1 large yellow or white onion, coarsely chopped
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4 garlic cloves, chopped
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2 jalapeño, serrano or poblano peppers, seeded and coarsely chopped
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Handful of cilantro sprigs, stems finely chopped and leaves left whole
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2 medium to large tomatoes, coarsely chopped
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salt to taste
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12 ounces light or dark Mexican beer (1 bottle or can)
Directions
In a large bowl, cover the beans with plenty of water and soak for 8 to 12 hours.
When ready to cook, in a large Dutch oven or pot, add the bacon, set over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until golden and crisp, 5 to 8 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the bacon to a plate or bowl, leaving the fat in the pot.
Add the onions, garlic, peppers and cilantro stems to the bacon fat and cook until softened and browned in spots, 10 to 12 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes and scrape up any browned bits on the bottom of the pot. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the beans to the pot. Pour in enough of the beans’ soaking liquid to cover the beans by 1 inch; if you run out of soaking liquid, use fresh water. Season generously with salt. Bring to a boil over high, then reduce heat to simmer until beans are tender but not yet soft or falling apart, 1 to 1½ hours. Check the beans periodically, and if the water level is below the beans, add soaking liquid or, if you’re out, fresh water to cover.
Taste the bean liquid and if it tastes dull or murky, add salt. Pour in the beer and gently simmer until the liquid has thickened slightly and the beans are soft and creamy, 30 to 40 minutes. Taste more than one bean to ensure they’re all cooked through; they should flatten without much effort when pressed between your fingers. Stir in the reserved bacon, then season to taste with salt. Eat with the reserved cilantro leaves. Beans will keep for up to 5 days refrigerated.
The post Don’t Fall for Trump’s D.E.I. Dodge appeared first on New York Times.
