July 22, 2026 E-Alert by Elaine Gross, Founder and President Emerita. Click here to view the e-alert in your browser.
After just 18 months, Donald Trump’s second term as President has established a new era of intense hostility to civil rights. It began on the first day of the term and has broadened to involve all three branches of government.
On the first day of his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.” It ordered the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to coordinate the termination of all diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the federal government, under whatever name they appear.
Opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion was an expedient gateway to implementing sweeping, illegal, discriminatory policies and actions.
Anti-Black racism was first on the list – with high-profile firings of prominent Black government officials and wholesale firings of Black federal employees without legitimate performance-based cause for the dismissals. In fact, many of these high-profile individuals had been publicly praised for their distinguished tenure.
In February 2025, President Trump fired General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s senior military official. Trump’s firing of the highly decorated General, who has received 28 awards and medals, broke the tradition that Joint Chiefs chairmen remain in place when administrations change, even when the president’s party changes. As The New York Times reported, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously said that General Brown should be fired because of a “woke” focus on D.E.I. programs in the military and questioned whether he was promoted because of his race.”
General Brown was replaced by, in the words of the Times, “a little-known retired three-star Air Force general, Dan Caine, who endeared himself to the president when they met in Iraq six years ago.” Caine is, of course, White.
Leading Black officials fired by Trump include, among others, Carla Hayden, the first African-American and the first woman to be the librarian of Congress; Robert E. Primus, the first Black board chairman of the federal regulator responsible for approving railroad mergers; Gwynne A. Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board; and Alvin Brown, the only Black member of the National Transportation Safety Board at the time of his removal.
Trump has also tried to fire Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve board of governors – and the first governor to be fired in the central bank’s 111-year history. When she sued to stop him, Trump took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided in Cook’s favor, stating in Trump v. Cook, “The Court rejects the Government’s halfhearted contention that Cook in fact received due process.”
As ProPublica reports, “a broad assessment of Trump’s firings by ProPublica and other media shows the agencies with the most diverse staffs are often the hardest hit. Before the firings, the Education Department’s staff was majority nonwhite, with Black women making up about 28% of workers, the most recent federal data shows. According to a New York Times tracker of the firings, that department has seen a reduction of about 46% of its staff. The staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development was majority women and nearly 40% racial and ethnic minorities before Trump all but eliminated it. Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, where white personnel make up two-thirds of the workforce, most of it men, staff has been cut just 1%, according to the most recently available federal data and the Times tracker. The Department of Energy, more than 70% white, saw a reduction of about 13%.”
On top of that, the Trump administration has named its anti-DEI policies as the cause for wholesale curtailing of civil rights investigations by agencies of the federal government. As The New York Times reports, “At Trump’s direction, federal agencies are abandoning discrimination cases. President Trump has tried to scale back anti-discrimination regulations that date back decades. Federal agencies have heeded his call.”
To expedite the abandonment of discrimination cases, the Trump administration has honed in on the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, an agency of the US Department of Labor that was created in 1965 to prohibit discrimination by government contractors on the basis of race, religion, gender and national origin. As The New York Times reported in July, “When Mr. Trump took office last year, the agency had jurisdiction over approximately 35,000 contractors that employed 20 percent of the U.S. work force — about 34 million people. …. The agency has been gutted, down from about 480 employees on Mr. Trump’s first day in office last year to about 75 as of May. Mr. Trump’s current budget proposal calls for eliminating it entirely, a move the White House argues would ensure fairness for all Americans.
Trump’s dismantling of DEI, his firing of prominent Black officials, his wholesale firing of Black federal employees, and his curtailing of civil rights investigations are accompanied by his simultaneous elevating of White Supremacy. As The New York Times reported in October 2025, “Of the president’s 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the administration’s most senior leadership roles in its first 200 days, ending on Aug. 7, only two, or 2 percent — Scott Turner, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Earl G. Matthews, the Defense Department’s general counsel — are Black.”
Over the 18 months of his second term, Trump has expanded his assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion relentlessly and with ever-expanding breadth. Those efforts, while often not evoking DEI explicitly, involve not only the executive branch but the legislative and judicial branches as well, both of which have a majority of Republicans.
In the executive branch, for instance, as EducationWeek reported in April 2025, “The U.S. Department of Education is ordering school districts and states to certify in writing that they’re not using diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, in order to continue receiving federal education funds.” In the military, as NPR reported on July 7, 2026, “Pete Hegseth's Pentagon has been dismantling diversity initiatives and blocking the promotions of high-ranking Black officers.”
In the judicial branch, as the Alliance for Justice stated on April 29, 2026, “Today the MAGA-led Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais by a 6-3 majority that states are allowed to racially gerrymander so long as they are savvy enough to not explicitly voice their discriminatory intent. By gutting the last remaining section of the VRA (Voting Rights Act) (Section 2), the Court’s decision hammered the final nail into the coffin of a law that protected access to the polls for over half a century. Today’s decision makes it impossible to ensure that Black voters and other historically marginalized groups have the fundamental right to have their voices heard in elections.”
The three Enforcement Acts (Force Acts) of 1870 and 1871 were passed by Congress to ensure that citizens who were formerly enslaved would no longer have their right to vote thwarted through violence and intimidation. In the southern states of the confederacy – with the power of White supremacy government, citizenry, and courts – they ignored the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments, and the Civil rights Act of 1866, that provided Black citizens legal and civil protections, including the right to vote.
The Force Acts offered temporary help, by authorizing the federal government and judges, U.S. Marshals, and the President to take actions to provide equal protection of the laws. However, a few years later, in 1877 when Reconstruction had ended, large-scale disenfranchisement of African American citizens returned in full force, until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
But in 2026, after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the following states rushed to redistrict: Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina. Texas, Missouri, Florida, and North Carolina already had. Georgia and Mississippi will likely redistrict ahead of the 2028 elections. All of that is being done, so that Blacks will not be able to vote into office candidates of their own choosing. Current Black Congresspeople watch as the districts that elected them are eliminated, further reducing the number of Blacks in Congress. It is 1877, again.
In the Congress, President Trump’s demands for passage of the SAVE Act ring through the halls, with the House of Representatives passing it and sending it on to the Senate. The Brennan Center for Justice says the bill “would be the most restrictive anti-voter bill ever passed by Congress” and “would block millions of eligible American citizens from voting.”
According to Human Rights Watch, the bill would disproportionately affect women, particularly those from marginalized communities: “Women who changed their legal names after marriage are among those most affected. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that around 85 percent of women change their surname in some way after marriage, and an estimated 69 million women in the US have legal names that do not match their birth certificates. To vote, they would need a passport reflecting their current legal name, or they would have to provide additional documentation, such as marriage certificates, divorce decrees, or court documents reflecting the name change, though the exact requirements remain unclear.”
These actions by the Trump administration are all connected. Each in its own way undermines diversity, equity, and inclusion and reinforces White supremacy. They do so even if they are, to use the words of the Alliance for Justice, “savvy enough to not explicitly voice their discriminatory intent.”
The number of Trump administration actions designed to undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion are too many to cite here, and that is the point. They are extensive, multi-faceted, and relentless. Yet diversity, equity, and inclusion are fundamental aspirations of a multi-racial democracy. That is why they are a key target for those seeking to reinforce White supremacy and install an authoritarian approach to government – one that will limit voting and undermine elections to keep in place in perpetuity an authoritarian mode of top-down decision-making.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are core concepts that autocratic leaders cannot tolerate. Those concepts undermine their endeavor to destroy the potential for a multi-racial democracy.
