Trump just killed federal affirmative action. The new Trump EO goes beyond even no longer mandating affirmative action among contractors. While DEI was required to get government contracts before, now it’s prohibited.

Christopher Caldwell says this is way bigger than people may think:

"Trump’s decision to repeal it is the most significant policy change of this century—more significant than the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or anything done about Covid. How can people be talking about anything else? Yet major news outlets treat Trump’s bold move as a detail of personnel management: “Distress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs,” headlined The New York Times.

"Somewhere along the line, the Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way how the enforcement of civil rights actually works. Not many Americans do—and it’s worth reviewing.

"It was possible to believe at the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that a good-faith moral commitment would suffice to remedy the devilish racial antagonism that had beset the country since its founding. That that wouldn’t work became obvious very quickly. Barely a year later, at the start of the summer of 1965, President Johnson argued before a Howard University graduating class that it’s not fair to make a runner “who, for years, has been hobbled by chains” compete with others.

"It sounded generous. But it was dark. Three months later, Johnson would issue Executive Order 11246, realizing that it was possible to remedy a racist system only by favoring the victim race, in doses of remedial racism, or what the British—apparently a more straightforward people than we are—call “reverse racism.”

"This was a course that the public could not tolerate and neither government nor business could avow. A climate of dishonesty was the result. Affirmative action was a big factor—perhaps the biggest—in convincing about half of Americans never to trust anything any person of authority said.

"Ten presidents managed to insulate affirmative action from public accountability. Then it became obvious to the public that changing anything would require dismantling everything."