David Remnick: The opening weeks of the Trump administration seem to have followed a mantra from Facebook's earlier years, move fast and break things and break them into a thousand pieces before anyone will notice. Last week we woke up to Elon Musk bragging that he was feeding a congressionally authorized agency with a $40+ billion budget into, and I quote, "a wood chipper." Breaking things at warp speed is very much the point now.

Many of the most draconian measures have been justified as emergency actions to root out DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. These are typically programs put in place by large companies or institutions or government agencies to encourage more diverse workplaces. The administration characterizes DEI as discrimination and broadly is the root of so much of what ails this nation. The temporary freeze of trillions of dollars in federal grants since rescinded was described as an anti-DEI measure. The tragic plane crash in Washington, the president also suggested, might well be the result of, yes, DEI.

To understand what's happening here and why, I sat down the other day with Jelani Cobb. Jelani Cobb is a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, and he's a historian and the dean of Columbia University's Journalism School. Jelani, barely two or three weeks in office, Donald Trump has gone after academia, journalism, and diversity. You're a dean, you're a journalist, and guess what? How are you holding up?

Jelani Cobb: It's like a barrage from all directions. The one thing that those disparate communities all seem to have in common is a sense of despair about what happens next and how do we navigate the trials of this moment.

David Remnick: Let's break this down then. What are the fears that you're sensing, for example, in academia, where you're spending most of your days, you're at Columbia University?

Jelani Cobb: In academia, the fears range. There are people who worry that their work, if it touches upon any sensitive subject matter or anything that the Trump administration looks unfavorably upon, that they won't be able to get funding. In some instances, these are projects that people have worked on for years. That's a huge fear for people. Then there's the political pressure. I've talked to untenured junior faculty who worry that if they research a subject related to race or related to gender, related to sexuality or gender identity, that that may make it more difficult for them to get tenure or more difficult for them to get grants and that kind of thing. Very much connected to career concerns.

David Remnick: Are those reasonable concerns, Jelani, since the people that are making the tenure decisions are senior faculty and deans?

Jelani Cobb: I think that there's a question of whether or not university administrators will stand up for faculty who research topics that are unpopular. There's the maybe not-so-unreasonable fear that you could become a target of a news story that paints you to be a caricature of what you are interested in researching. One of the things that's notable is the extent to which people have begun pulling the historical literature on universities during the McCarthy period, that talk about how we navigated that particular crisis.

David Remnick: What executive orders that have been issued so far related to DEI concern you most?

Jelani Cobb: In the conversations I've had with people, some of whom are fairly knowledgeable on this, they've been of the more than one way to skin a cat persuasion. If they're not able to freeze federal funds around DEI or related subject matter, there may be other ways of arm-twisting people into compliance. There's fear about endowment taxes being levied against large universities, particularly wealthy ones. There are fears about whether or not students from abroad will be able to get visas with the same ease that they once did. That will, of course, have a financial implication.

Then there's the other power of the purse string, which is the ability-- coming out of the civil rights movement, the ability to withhold federal funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. The conversation around DEI has overwhelmingly pointed to DEI as a anti-white discrimination.

David Remnick: Jelani, what is DEI at its best in your view, and are there abuses of it, and how would you describe them?

Jelani Cobb: At its best, DEI represents an effort from companies, institutions, various walks of American life to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the actions or the work of those institutions. Recognizing the disparities that are baked into American life, it is an attempt to undo them. For instance, for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans collectively represent almost 40% of the population in this country. Only about 16% to 17% of the journalists in this country belong to one of those groups.

Often those disparities reflect age-old prohibitions and barriers to entry for different groups. Sometimes they just represent a inertia of networks that people hire people who they know, people who they know tend to have similar backgrounds, and that kind of thing. Diversity is meant to be a self-aware approach to saying, "Hey, as opposed to just operating in the way that we always had, let's try to make sure that we reach out to people who might not have been considered previously."

David Remnick: What's so terrible about that?

Jelani Cobb: Here's the thing. Prior to the last few years, certainly, prior to the rise of Donald Trump as a political force, most of the criticism you saw of DEI was from the left. People felt that it was toothless. It was checking boxes. When you looked at between 2010 and 2020, the number of non-white lawyers in the United States, according to the American Bar Association, went from 11% to 14%, which means that the number of white lawyers in the United States went from 89% to down to 86. Steep drop in that time frame.

That progress was seen as incremental. In fact, the most cynical views of DEI saw it as a corporate insurance. If anyone said that this institution discriminates, they can say, look at our DEI policies. They may be toothless, but we're--

David Remnick: There was a book about this called Diversity Inc. I don't know if you read this, and if you stick around long enough at any company, sooner or later, you'll be sent to a diversity training. Which I have to say, certainly one of them that I went to seemed, beside the point at best and a racket at worst, and didn't have any positive impact on anybody's consciousness, much less hiring. There can be an abuse of it.

Jelani Cobb: I think that there's a skeptical way of looking at this. Certainly, having sat through various trainings of various sorts, I didn't necessarily leave any of them feeling as if I was brimming with new knowledge.

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David Remnick: That's put in a much more elegant way. I appreciate that.

Jelani Cobb: Here's what--

David Remnick: What causes a president of the United States on the eve of a horrible tragedy, like a plane crash, with seeming sincerity and all the chutzpah in the world to blame that horrible accident, the deaths of dozens of people on DEI and get away with it?

Jelani Cobb: I think that what's happened around Trump, and we mentioned the McCarthy era before, and I think there's an important parallel between Trump and McCarthy. There are lots of important parallels, but in this one particular case, everything that was associated with Joseph McCarthy happened prior to Joseph McCarthy. He didn't originate any of these things, but he did have the instinctive ability to see where the crowd was headed and run out to the front of it. I think that Donald Trump did very much the same with the politics of racial resentment that have come to be a defining feature, among other things, of the Trump era.

He understood that there was a set of people, and this is statistically borne out, who felt that white Americans were particularly disadvantaged. What they were seeking was a public redress, something that would say that the government was looking out for them, too. For all of the toothlessness of DEI and some circumstances, it still made a potent target to say that you're uprooting it, that you're removing it. Then you've also heard that language bandied about from lots of people in Trump's circle, particularly Elon Musk, to a point that it becomes pretty close to the old race science. The ideas of inherent intelligence and IQ measuring and those kinds of things.

The belief is that everything that has gone wrong with America is a product of not operating at a meritocracy, and that meritocracy would necessarily result in these institutions being more monochromatic than they have become over the years.

David Remnick: Yet we've seen the vote for Donald Trump among the Black community, among the Latino community, increase this last time around.

Jelani Cobb: I think the thing that's interesting-- There are two things here. One is that that increase benefited from the absence of enthusiasm from other people in those communities who just opted for the couch over the ballot box in this most recent election. The other, however, is that-- The thing that I think Trump has done more masterfully than probably any other modern American politician is the ability to own both sides of an issue and the ability to operate with particular kinds of wedges.

For African American men whose voting behavior had been more predictable based upon their race, all of a sudden it became clear that there were gender ideas, and the very masculinist dynamics of the Trump movement appealed to a certain portion of that population. I think people saw the same thing with Latino male voters, too. It is a house of cards in terms of the structure of all of it. Once you start pulling at how people understand their interests, this doesn't add up. Trump is a master salesman. The idea is that you don't think about what you've bought until you've left the store. By that point, it's too late.

David Remnick: Trump also released an executive order saying he would divert federal funds from schools teaching what he calls discriminatory equity ideology. It also said the government would sanction any school that taught that people can be oppressed due to their race, which is amazing. What does that mean in practice? How can a teacher reasonably deal with this?

Jelani Cobb: If a president says something like that, people should reasonably take it seriously. Even if this doesn't come from the federal level, in which we'd run into a lot of First Amendment complications, at the very least, it sets a tone in which a person might well become the subject of digital harassment or in-person harassment, or they may find pressure placed upon their employers in various kinds of ways. We've seen this over the course of the years. If you remember the anti-CRT hysteria--

David Remnick: Race theory.

Jelani Cobb: Critical race theory, which just a few years ago turned every school board meeting in the country into the Hunger Games practically, or WWE, where people were concerned that their children were being indoctrinated with ideas that were not being taught in elementary and junior high schools in this country.

David Remnick: I'm speaking with Jelani Cobb. He's the author of The Substance Of Hope: Barack Obama And The Paradox Of Progress and many other books. We'll continue our conversation in a moment.

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David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking today with Jelani Cobb, who's a historian and a staff writer at the New Yorker. We're talking about the Trump administration's wholesale assault on DEI, programs in the federal government and elsewhere that encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI is a singular obsession for Donald Trump and his allies. I'll return now to my conversation with journalist and historian, Jelani Cobb.

In 2023, the Supreme Court issued its ruling that ended affirmative action as we knew it. Coupled with that, how are these executive orders going to affect the environment that you're in at Columbia and academia writ large?

Jelani Cobb: Everyone is trying to figure that out. I'm at my own institution daily, and I'm in contact with scholars from around the country. Everyone is trying to figure this out. Affirmative action has been ended by the Supreme Court. There's a significant Venn overlap between affirmative action and DEI, but they're not necessarily the same thing.

David Remnick: Explain that.

Jelani Cobb: One of the parts of inclusion would be if we say that we don't have enough African American or enough Latino engineers. We're going to create a pipeline program in high schools that have significant numbers of Hispanic or African American students and say, "Would you like to be an engineer?" This is a voluntary thing, and it's giving people access to something. It's not giving them any consideration they didn't already have. That would fall very much on the DEI, but it wouldn't fall necessarily under affirmative action, is that permissible? People don't know.

What may be legally permissible may or may not be politically permissible or culturally permissible in this particular moment. We're waiting in an almost case-by-case basis to see how all of this shakes out. No one has marching orders just yet.

David Remnick: How do you evaluate, as both a journalist and somebody leading a journalism school, the reaction of the press in these early weeks to what's been going on in Washington?

Jelani Cobb: Certainly, for mainstream press, it has been notable the extent to which the reconciliation has happened or what has been perceived as a reconciliation with Donald Trump and Trumpism. Of course, during the campaign, we saw the LA Times and Washington Post both spike editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Subsequently, we saw ABC News settle a lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that many people felt that they had a good chance of winning. We now have seen reports that Paramount may be in talks with the Trump people about settling lawsuit over the 60 Minutes case, which Donald Trump felt was defamatory toward him.

David Remnick: Paramount controls CBS. In almost every one of these cases, though, it seems the problem is that the corporations that own these media outlets have much bigger fish to fry in the corporate world than their media outlets. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and bought it for $250 million, that to him is nothing compared to the scale of Amazon itself.

Jelani Cobb: Critics on the left of American media have been pointing out the potential for this conflict of interest forever. Even when we think about the old advertisement-supported model of newspapers which has gone by the wayside, it was at best an imperfect solution that we had what we called the separation of church and state. The separation from the revenue side and the editorial side. That was never a great situation. I think that we're seeing this play out on a much bigger scale. This isn't a new problem.

David Remnick: What I notice sometimes, speaking with friends who aren't in the press, who are doing all kinds of other things, they don't want to engage with the news too much. They feel exhausted. They feel psychologically self-protective in the way that is very different from 2017. Any number of people say, "I refuse to watch CNN or I refuse to read the paper," and I'm shocked by it.

Jelani Cobb: David, I heard this in the past few weeks from people who are themselves very highly placed in the news business.

David Remnick: That's not encouraging at all.

Jelani Cobb: It's not encouraging.

David Remnick: It seems like a dereliction of duty.

Jelani Cobb: It's still true. I think that also there's another part of this. The parallel to this is there are many people who feel like they don't want to watch the news or listen to the news. There are journalists who wonder what the point is. I've had those conversations, too. Like, "Is anyone listening to us? Does anyone care if we point out things that are outrageous or dangerous?"

David Remnick: I'm sorry, but don't they need to buck up and stand up, too?

Jelani Cobb: Sure, but I think that we have to at least begin by acknowledging that we have this particular problem. Morale is not great. We have people who think that they've done their job to the best of their ability and it hasn't made the difference that they hoped it might make. The thing that I point out when I'm talking with my students is we should never allow young or emerging journalists to have the idea that there's a one-to-one relationship between our effort and the outcome.

I quote you, as a matter of fact, in talking about the number of stories that highlighted the misdeeds and misbehavior of powerful men that somehow never generated a MeToo movement. Then all of a sudden there was one. We don't know what the ratio is. It's unknowable, unpredictable, completely random. My version of encouragement has been that we keep doing the work until we get to that breakthrough moment where it actually, really, really does make a difference.

David Remnick: For a long time now, Steve Bannon has been talking about the importance of flooding the zone to cause a blitz of news and orders and activity from the White House with the idea that the media would never be able to focus their attention. I have to say that seems to be working out just fine for Donald Trump at the moment at least.

Jelani Cobb: I tend to think of this as a short-term strategy. There was a boxer back in the '80s that you might remember named Frank "The Animal" Fletcher.

David Remnick: I do. You're the first person today to mention Frank "The Animal" Fletcher to me.

Jelani Cobb: That's shocking. I find it hard to believe, but you recall his strategy was just to overwhelm his opponent, to just crowd him and throw all kinds of punches nonstop, and so on. There was a flaw in that strategy, which is that eventually, you run out of steam, that you can throw up flack and shrapnel and the kinds of things, and you can do this in terms of flooding the Zone for a limited period of time.

David Remnick: You're saying a 78-year-old president can't keep it up forever.

Jelani Cobb: Yes, exactly. I think that at some point, this becomes a counterproductive exercise in its own right.

David Remnick: I think there's an awareness among Trump's people that that's absolutely the case. In many presidencies, the first burst of activity, the first 100 days, certainly the first two years before the midterms, is what's most crucial in getting things done. A lot of activity can register as accomplishments for him very quickly because of our inability to account for it, sort it through.

Jelani Cobb: That's true. It also rests upon the presumption that the things that Trump and his people have foregrounded in the past-- feels like past 100 days, actually been the past two weeks, that that aligns with the things that people care about. That remains to be seen. The culture war things he's used to great profit. As we saw, large reason why he lost the reelection bid in 2020 was the pandemic, which was a national crisis that he mishandled. There are other crises that are going to come up, and there are other crises that are emergent even at the moment. How they navigate those things, I think will be at least as important as their ability to flood the zone with all different distracting concerning actions.

Speaker 1: You mentioned McCarthyism earlier, and you're a scholar of the Cold War, among other things. What are the similarities that you see between the Red Scare, the anti-communist campaign of the '50s, and what we're seeing now with DEI?

Jelani Cobb: During the Cold War, you could taint anything by just saying that it was communistic or Marxist. The interesting connection with the Civil Rights Movement is that when I was young, I was like, "Why were people connecting racial equality with communism?" Just saying that if you integrate the schools, it's communism? Then at some point, it became clear to me that their definition of communism was integration. It didn't have anything to do with redistributing the means of production or expropriating wealth. Communism can be anything that you don't like.

Now DEI is the boogeyman for anything. If there's a terrible tragedy, something we would normally have processed in a nonpartisan way, we can all grieve people who've died in a plane crash or a helicopter crash, particularly people who are parts of the military. Now, all of a sudden, that can be blamed on DEI. If there is something going wrong in any part of your life, you can just-- If there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that somehow another DEI is there.

David Remnick: Do you think this will fade?

Jelani Cobb: I tend to think that these things are like fevers they, they break at some point. The fact is that you do have to, irrespective of how masterful Trump and those around him have been in playing on particular social anxieties and fears, at some point, you do have to actually govern. That is not easy. We'll see.

David Remnick: You'll let me know when he does. Jelani Cobb, I appreciate your time. Be well.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you. Good talking to you.

David Remnick: You can read Jelani Cobb on politics, race, and much more at newyorker.com, and at the very same website on the eve of our 100th anniversary. You can subscribe to the magazine there, too.

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