Trump's idea of 'competence' — only white men need apply

Yes, “The Daily Show,” is a comedy show. But host Jon Stewart made a serious point after President Trump, with no evidence, blamed a fatal air crash on diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI efforts to bring women and racial minorities into the federal workforce.

Trump is making a deliberate effort, Stewart said, to “make the default setting on competence in America a white guy.”

Pointing to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Stewart sarcastically said the television personalities got their jobs “purely based on merit. And smarts.”

Stephen A. Smith, the ESPN sports commentator, was not trying to be funny when he made a similarly stinging point about Trump’s promotion of Hegseth to Fox’s Sean Hannity.

Hegseth’s rise to “defense secretary of the United States overseeing 3.5 million people — that’s not qualified,” Smith said. He implied that Hegseth was a classic example of identity politics benefiting unqualified white men, such as those in Trump’s cabinet.

Trump’s preference for white men, even those with glaring flaws, was evident when he recently hired a white man who wrote last October that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Darren Beattie, now at the State Department, was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after speaking at a conference that had drawn white nationalists. Now, he is back in the Trump administration after deriding all diversity efforts as “coddling the feelings of women and minority and demoralizing competent white men.”

Can anyone imagine Trump hiring a black man who made such a prejudiced statement about whites?

It is hard not to see racism in Trump’s unrelenting attack on diversity programs at the start of his second term. His assault comes despite a November Pew poll that shows a 52 percent majority support diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to give men and women of all races an equal opportunity in a multi-racial nation.

In 2019, amid his first term as president, two polls, one by Politico/Morning Consult and the other by Quinnipiac, found 54 percent and 51 percent of Americans had concluded that Trump is a racist.

Since then, Trump has talked about immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation, called “Black Lives Matter” a hate symbol and recently pardoned insurrectionists tied to white supremacist groups.

That has led to a stark racial divide in Trump’s approval rating. A Pew poll last week underscored this, giving Trump a net minus-59 point rating with Blacks, minus-26 points with Hispanics Americans, but plus-12 points with whites.

This racial split among Americans is reflected in the polarization between Republicans and Democrats over Trump. Two-thirds of Republicans, in a 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, said that paying attention to diversity “means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity.”

Over the last few weeks, I have traveled across the country promoting my new book, New Prize for These Eyes. From Seattle, to San Francisco, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, I’ve listened to Americans talk about race relations with Trump back in the White House.

What I heard is that even for Trump’s supporters it requires blinders not to see racism in Trump’s actions.

It is disappointing for many Trump loyalists when he halts Justice Department efforts to reform police departments facing charges of racist brutality. Blindness to racism is a must to look away as Trump wipes out a 1965 order calling for government contractors to end discrimination in hiring against women, blacks, Latinos, and other minority groups.

President Lyndon Johnson had signed that order the year after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, because he said blacks remained burdened by a history of not being given equal opportunity.

Sixty years later, Trump ordered all federal workers tied to diversity programs to be put on leave. His call for “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” led the Air Force to stop showing training videos celebrating the historic work of the black pilots during World War II. Despite segregation, they fought for the U.S. as the Tuskegee Airmen. That order was so outrageous that a Republican senator from Alabama protested, and it was quickly reversed.

Then there’s Marko Elez, a Department of Government Efficiency staffer whom Elon Musk said he would reinstate after The Wall Street Journal uncovered old social media posts allegedly from Elez advocating to “normalize Indian hate” and institute a “eugenic immigration policy.”

Incredibly, Vice President JD Vance — who is wed to an Indian American — leapt to Elez’s defense: “I don’t worry about my kids’ making mistakes or developing views they later regret,” Vance posted on X.

Fair point. No one deserves to be judged solely by the worst thing they’ve ever said. However, as a confidante of Musk, this man wields enormous power. Will his self-proclaimed racial biases influence his use of power?

The iconic conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. recognized the dangers of reactionary politics and resisted the racist, anti-Semitic forces of the John Birch Society, which attempted to hijack the Republican Party in the 1960s.

Where is the Bill Buckley of this generation — willing to call out these racially incendiary games as a danger to the republic?

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for these Eyes: the Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”

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