The FBI shut down its DEI office. And Donald Trump is … mad?
As The Hill reported, the FBI closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion last month, seemingly succumbing to the conservatives who have portrayed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as an affront to straight white men or some kind of impediment to the agency’s success.
Local law enforcement agencies have highlighted various benefits that DEI initiatives bring to their departments and the communities they serve. Nonetheless, Trump said during his campaign that he would root out “anti-white feeling” if elected president. And he even vowed to award “restitution” to students he described as victims of “illegal and unjust” DEI policies. So with the closure of this FBI office, one might say the agency essentially bent the knee to Trump and the Republican Party before he returned to power.
And how did the president-elect respond? With a petulant social media post, saying:
We demand that the FBI preserve and retain all records, documents, and information on the now closing DEI Office—Never should have been opened and, if it was, should have closed long ago. Why is it that they’re closing one day before the Inauguration of a new Administration? The reason is, CORRUPTION!
This is Trumpian incoherence at its worst.
He’s essentially raging at the FBI for doing what he and Republicans wanted — to abandon, or at least appear to abandon, DEI efforts — and saying that the agency should have acquiesced … sooner? In some ways, it’s a perfect distillation of Trump’s character: a whiny and power-hungry gripe rooted in bigotry.
It would be easy to dismiss this as just the latest drop in what seems like an endless stream of diatribes from Trump. But his demand that FBI officials preserve documents is noteworthy — and suggests he has more planned on this front.
Trump’s demand that FBI officials preserve documents is noteworthy — and suggests he has more planned on this front.
As I see it, Trump may want to do one of two things. One option is for his administration to use the documents to wage some sort of legal war against officials who led the office or carried out its policies, as he has threatened to do with other political foes. Another option could be for his administration to cherry-pick data from these documents to establish some sort of pretext saying the office constituted some form of government waste, which could then be used to cut similar offices at other agencies.
Republicans are already busy on this front. For example, The Washington Post reports that conservatives working for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Department of Government Efficiency” are using a study from a right-wing nonprofit called the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which has led multiple lawsuits accusing programs of anti-white discrimination, to map out $125 billion in cuts to federal programs they’ve categorized as “DEI.”
It’s unclear what, exactly, Trump wants to do with the FBI documents he’s demanding. But it’s entirely clear he doesn’t want to let the closure of the agency’s DEI office to be the end of this story, even if it was a concession to him and his bigotry-fueled movement.
