The Trump team has hit on what it thinks is a winning formula: every time it wants to rip Americans’ health care away or let a predatory corporation off the hook, it just says it’s fighting “wokeness” or “DEI.” It’s lazy, cynical stuff.
One month in, the basic gambit of the second Trump administration seems to be that they think you’re stupid.
Donald Trump’s team seems convinced they can ignore the long-standing problems that have made normal life insecure or impossible for average people in the United States — even that they can make those problem worse and create whole new ones — and that you won’t notice they’re doing it if they carry out the political equivalent of jangling keys in front of a baby.
They think they can cut regulations that stop corporations from preying on Americans or endangering them by cutting corners; as long as they say it was “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “critical race theory” (CRT), you’ll nod along gamely. They think that as long as they shout “wokeness,” they can take your health care away, put you out of a job, and turn a blind eye to predatory firms price gouging you, and you won’t realize you’re being screwed over — that you’ll be happy about it, in fact.
Look at US air travel. Earlier this week, Trump — or, technically, DOGE, his “Department of Governmental Efficiency” — purged nearly three hundred personnel from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), who do the invisible but vital work that ensures that you don’t have to worry about dying when you fly somewhere.
He did this even though there have now been four US plane crashes in the month since he took office, including the deadliest aircraft crash in twenty years and one just this week, when a Delta plane that took off from Minneapolis flipped upside down upon landing in Toronto mere hours after Trump’s purge of FAA workers. We’re still waiting to find out exactly what caused that incident, but it’s inarguable that one of the underlying issues in the spate of major plane accidents we’ve seen the past few years is both regulatory capture by the airline industry and chronic understaffing in aviation, something that Trump’s reckless FAA purge is going to make worse.
Not in Trumpworld, though. No sooner had the Delta plane flipped than were pro-Trump influencers and press outlets blaming, without bothering to present even a shadow of evidence for it, that the cause was the company’s commitment to DEI policies. This was the same move they pulled after the DC crash, when Trump himself baselessly blamed workers of poor “psychological quality” hired through DEI programs — and admitted, when asked for evidence, that he had none and was simply relying on his “common sense.” Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow asked, “Did a Diversity Hire Cause Mass Death?”
The answer to that question was no: even as he asked it, Marlow admitted he had no actual idea whether the pilot was actually a “diversity hire,” even as he insisted that Trump definitely “knew what was going on.” (In the real world, DEI has not even come up in the subsequent investigation, which has instead revealed that the helicopter involved in the crash may have had faulty data and had its communication interrupted, potentially leading to the tragedy.
To sum up: Trump and his movement distracted from the real, nuts-and-bolts issues at hand by squawking about DEI, provided no evidence to justify it, and moved on without correcting the record. Then, as crashes continue to pile up, they’ve kept pointing at this pet obsession anyway, while Trump quietly takes steps that will make it much more likely another crash happens in the future.
When it does, guess what they’ll decide is the culprit before the flames are even put out.
Getting Ripped Off Is Based
This is not an outlier. This playbook is central to how the Trump administration and the figures behind it are operating.
Take Trump’s demolition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the consumer watchdog that over the past fourteen years has stopped predatory Wall Street firms from ripping Americans off and getting two hundred million Americans more than $21 billion in restitution. That includes billions from Wells Fargo for wrongly foreclosing on people’s homes, illegally repossessing their cars, and using a faulty automated system that froze one million out of their accounts, and millions from TD Bank for putting false information on people’s credit reports.
In theory, eliminating an agency like this would be a tough sell, especially for an administration that claims to be fighting corruption and “elites” on behalf of working Americans. So to square this circle, the Trump White House and one of its media arms simply declared the CFPB “woke,” highlighted a handful of its minor actions fitting that description, then lazily attached a misleading accusation that the agency had engaged in “overreach.” Specifically, they meant when the agency barred medical debt from being included in credit reports and sharply limited bank overdraft fees — a textbook case of the “woke, weaponized arm of the bureaucracy” taking aim at “industries and individuals disfavored by so-called ‘elites,’” according to the Trump administration.
One of the voices demanding the CFPB be “shut down” for being “woke and weaponized” was the Center for Renewing America, the think tank of Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director and by all accounts the man behind both Trump’s entire second term and Republicans’ agenda in Congress. At the very top of the center’s list of the CFPB’s supposed “woke” sins are complaints by two billionaires, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, that the agency was punishing Meta for no reason and simply “terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.” In fact, the CFPB had sued Meta for improperly tracking its users’ financial information to sell to advertisers, and the list of predatory behavior from financial firms it has punished is a long one.
“Wokeness” is pulling double duty here: not only is it the shiny object used to distract you from the fact that the administration is doing the bidding of big banks that want to pick your pockets, but it’s also a way to launder the complaints of powerful elites who want to act like they’re powerless victims.
Own the Libs by Letting Corporations Own You
Speaking of Vought, look at what he does when he makes the case for cutting Medicaid, as House Republicans, in line with his own mock budget, are right now preparing to do. This is a move so unpopular, including with the many Trump voters who rely on the program, that Trump himself has had to repeatedly lie to the public that there’s no plan to do so. So Vought simply labels it “woke and weaponized Medicaid” and talks about how it helps undocumented immigrants and funds gender reassignment — even though his plan is to cut the program for everyone who uses it, no matter what their medical needs.
This is Vought’s standard playbook. Releasing the outline of his mock budget in 2023, his think tank framed it as a matter of “removing the scourge of woke and weaponized government bureaucracy.”
But the actual cuts were aimed at repealing the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, functionally ripping health care from nearly twenty million people, and slashing the program more generally by one-third, as well as eliminating rent subsidies for low-income Americans and making it harder to qualify for Medicaid, food stamps, and disability insurance — all while cutting taxes for the rich. When Vought was asked under oath to explain how any of this was getting rid of “wokeness,” he refused to answer the question.
The cynicism involved here is matched only by its obvious disdain for people’s intelligence.
Or look at Sen. Ted Cruz’s recently released database of thousands of “woke DEI grants” from the National Science Foundation, which he claims are pushing “class warfare propaganda” to the tune of $2 billion and should be on the chopping block. Actually read through the list, though, and you see Cruz waging class warfare under cover of battling wokeness.
Cruz’s database has targeted a whole host of worthy research projects that stand to benefit the country, not least the working-class Americans his party now claims to represent. There are research projects, for instance, for better management of aging city infrastructure in Pittsburgh, improving recovery of basement flooding in east Detroit, and dealing with coastal flooding in low-income parts of Long Island.
Other research projects are for making it easier to diagnose and treat brain aneurysms, to help develop a cheap autonomous wheelchair that can be used for longer time periods and distances, and to advance the care of neurological disorders that are becoming more and more common among the country’s aging population.
It’s doubtful many Trump voters, even those who have conservative social views, would agree these projects are a waste of money. But Cruz thinks that as long as he says “DEI” or whatever other buzzword that’s taken off in Trump’s inner circle, it’ll be enough to fool them that they are.
Maybe the most cynical and dishonest example of this comes in a recent Breitbart hit piece on the Department of Justice’s just-departed antitrust chief Doha Mekki, calling her a “leftist activist” who pursued a “woke agenda” and “radical actions” in her brief time in the post. As journalist Ryan Grim pointed out and detailed at length, Breitbart did this by flagrantly misleading their readers.
They do this first by pointing to a speech by Mekki that’s supposed to show how she made civil and social rights, not anti-monopoly work, her top priority, claiming that she argued antitrust laws should be used against racism. In reality, the point of her speech is the exact opposite: that protecting economic rights is the most essential to freedom, because “when we do not protect economic opportunity — when we allow monopolies to go unchecked — other rights suffer or disappear entirely.”
Meanwhile, what is the “woke agenda” Mekki pursued? Breitbart is infuriated that she sued six enormous corporate landlords over using an artificial intelligence algorithm to jack up their tenants’ rents, and “most significantly,” that she stopped the largest travel management companies from acquiring its second-biggest rival, which would have undermined competition and led to higher prices.
Got that? According to Breitbart, protecting Americans’ economic rights, stopping corporate landlords from rent-gouging, and preventing corporate consolidation — that’s “woke.” Stick it to the latte-sipping elite by letting yourself get ripped off instead.
Prove Them Wrong
What we call “wokeness” is a very real phenomenon, and as this magazine has pointed out repeatedly, it is both annoying and genuinely damaging. For the past decade, neoliberal Democrats have been particularly insufferable in wielding it as a weapon to advance pro-corporate politics, whether Hillary Clinton saying that breaking up the big banks wouldn’t end racism and sexism, or MSNBC anchors and politicians like Barack Obama endlessly complaining about Bernie Sanders being a white man who didn’t talk enough about race and gender.
But what we’re seeing take shape in Trump’s second term is not the antidote to that; it’s that exact same cynical strategy, only flipped on its head. While Democrats turned to woke rhetoric to defend corporations and push neoliberal policies that benefit their bottom lines, Trump and his people resort to equally lazy “anti-woke” rhetoric to do the same thing.
In each case, the basic assumption is the same: you are a gullible rube who will fall for this obvious play and promptly forget that they’re working against your interests. Prove them wrong.