Trump Is Anti-DEI but Pro-OPK (Oligarchs, Plutocrats, & Kleptocrats) Hiring Practices

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

― Lyndon B. Johnson

When former President Lyndon B. Johnson stated this in the 1960s, he could have been gazing into a crystal ball predicting the political agenda on which Donald Trump would base his racist and misogynistic campaigns in his effort to divide and conquer the electorate.

He has transformed the terms within the concept of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) into accusations and epithets for unqualified, low experience, low education, low expectations, anti-white, and anti-male regarding workplace quality and performance.

In reality, however, to paraphrase the National Association for Multicultural Education:

“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a philosophical and educational model founded on principles of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and the empowerment of human agency, integrity, and dignity as illuminated in respective key documents, including the United States Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. DEI affirms a standard of governmental, educational, and business policies and practices in organizing and sustaining positive, warm, and welcoming places essential in a democratic society. It values the many social and cultural differences and identities and prizes the pluralism that all people bring.”

What is more “pro-American” and “patriotic” than programs and people who are attempting to bring about the promise of our founding documents?

With most social change efforts, however, opposing forces have launched a fierce and sustained backlash to turn back progressive social change, which we are seeing now toward DEI initiatives.

While in the Oval Office during his first term, for example, then President Donald Trump in September 2020 signed an executive order banning DEI programs in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and other institutions that held or applied for federal contracts. The stated purpose of the order was to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping.”

In his ruthless campaign to turn Florida into the place “where WOKE goes to die,” for example, Governor Ron DeSantis launched a frontal assault on issues of DEI initiatives in that state, and to place the final nail in the coffin of Affirmative Action in higher education stemming from the recent Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (Harvard) and SFFA v. University of North Carolina.

On the Fox cable network broadcasting on location somewhere on Earth 2, program host Laura Ingraham blasted DEI and, in particular, diversity hires, for causing the incident of a door panel blowing off the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane over the state of Oregon at 16,000 feet, which terrified passengers and forced the pilots to make an emergency landing.

Though acknowledging that she had no proof for her claim that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at Boeing, a private company, led to the near disaster, her implication was clear:

“We can’t link the diversity efforts to what happened, that would take an exhaustive investigation,” she admitted. “But it’s worth asking at this point, is excellence what we need in airline operation, or is diversity the goal here?”

By implication, these efforts in industry are more related to “wokeness” than to hiring talented and highly qualified employees. Ingraham and others on the political right are sending the not-so-subtle message that quality and diversity in hiring are mutually exclusive, and that companies are prioritizing diversity over safety.

During the unprecedented windblown wildfires in Southern California this month, billionaires Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, among others on social media platforms, have, without any evidence blasted the Los Angeles Fire Department’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as the cause of the widespread devastation and loss of life.

Musk has reposted several posts on X including a post Wednesday night, January 8, 2025 that “DEI means people DIE.”

Kristin Crowley, Chief of the LAFD, her online biography says she is the department’s first woman and first LGBTQ chief since 2022. She also wrote that her department created a diversity, equity and inclusion bureau the year she was hired. Though creating greater diversity within the force was one of her ten initial objectives, reducing readiness and quality of service never entered into the equation. Crowley’s main focus has always been on preventing fires and eliminating those that have started..

Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh on X argued, also without proof, that the LAFD “deliberately set out to exclude white men from becoming firefighters” by announcing its commitments to hiring and retaining more diverse employees.

And going far beyond Ingraham’s racist dog whistle, Elon Musk, by comparison, shouted from the rooftops into his high-volume microphone on his X platform his disdain for DEI efforts by promoting a Tweet arguing that graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have IQs nearing “borderline intellectual impairment.” This comes on the heels of the billionaire broadcasting a tweet asserting that Jews push “hatred against whites.”

Musk promoted the Tweet of a popular user called @eyeslasho, which argued that the United Airlines program of hiring traditionally underrepresented employees such as people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and others, some from HBCUs, is dangerous because graduates from HBCUs are not intelligent, and, therefore, not qualified to fly a plane.

“The mean IQ of grads from two of those United Airline HBCU ‘partners’ is about 85 to 90, based on the average SATs at those schools. (The SAT correlates reasonably well with IQ.),” @eyeslasho wrote. “The HBCU IQ averages are within 10 points of the threshold for what is considered ‘borderline intellectual impairment.’”

Musk added: “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” Musk responded by rearranging the letters of the acronym for Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

While opportunities have opened up somewhat for people of color at primarily white universities since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, hundreds of thousands of people attend HBUCs today because of the high-quality education, stimulating atmosphere, and diversity in the student population and among their professors and the cultural sensitivity in pedagogical methodologies. In addition, by 2018, non-black students comprised 24% of enrollment at HBCUs.

Esteemed graduates from these institutions include Thurgood Marshall, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris among many others.

While Trump, Musk, and others on the political right oppose DEI initiatives, they stand in full and unqualified support for politics, programs, and institutions that promote OPK (oligarchs, plutocrats, and kleptocrats) hiring and retention initiatives. Simply check out Trump’s cabinet, advisors, and ambassador choices for his second term with the unprecedented number of billionaires, and the possibility of a joint Trump/Musk presidency.

The Myth of Meritocracy

The continuing and perennial need for DEI programs in schools and industry lay bare the lie that the United States stands as a meritocratic nation build on the dream and practice that hard work, talent, and ambition alone is the ticket to success, regardless of one’s former background in terms of social identities.

The story goes something like this: For those of us living in the United States, it matters not from which station of life we came. It matters not about our backgrounds and social or personal identities. We each have been born into a system that guarantees equal and equitable access to opportunities.

Success is ours through hard work, study, ambition, and by deferring gratification to later in our lives. We will succeed if we “keep our nose stuck to the grindstone” (ouch!) and “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” (without falling over on our faces).

This concept of “meritocracy” is founded on “personal responsibility,” and those who do not achieve success must accept responsibility for their failures. Maybe they did not try hard enough. Maybe they failed to scale any barriers that could have been placed in their way because they did not have enough will and self-control, fortitude, intelligence, character, or because they simply made bad choices.

While of course, we are all accountable and liable for our actions, what impact do the systemic conditions of our nation have to do with personal success?

This concept of meritocracy fails to consider the long legacy of differentials of power and privilege based on the social identities of race, socioeconomic class, gender and gender identity, sexual identity, ability, age, and others.

Today, the United States stands as the most culturally and religiously diverse country in the world. This diversity poses great challenges and great opportunities. The way we meet these challenges will determine whether we remain in the abyss of our history or whether we can truly achieve our promise of becoming a shining beacon to the world.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, when deployed effectively, can give us all the opportunity to shine to our outer limits of our potential.