
President Donald Trump’s new anti-diversity executive order is off to a rocky start, according to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who flagged a crucial snag in the administration’s attempt to purge DEI keywords from government documents.
The MSNBC host opened her show Tuesday night by shredding Trump’s purging of DEI-related diversity programs before revealing what she believed to be the true intention behind the administration’s quest to erase anti-diversity protections in the country.
“Here’s a clear case in which a stupidity problem has arisen here,” Maddow told viewers after referencing a report in the Guardian that detailed how the administration’s deletion of DEI-keywords is leading to unintended results, including with the Internal Revenue Service’s procedural handbook for employees.
“Before the Trump administration started willy-nilly control-f deleting anything that had any quote ‘DEI’ reference, there used to be parts of this tax manual that made reference to, say, the ‘inequity’ of the government holding on to certain taxpayer money,” Maddow said Tuesday. “Also, the need to check for the ‘inclusion’ of a taxpayer identification number on a particular form. But now that Trump’s in there, that’s not in the tax manual any more.”
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Maddow, a staunch Trump critic, added in a mocking tone: “They deleted those references because ‘Oh my god,’ inclusion. Don’t say the Trump White House never did anything for you, they’re saving us all from the dangerous references to the inclusion of tax ID numbers with certain forms.”
She said the same “anti-DEI guise” resulted in “thousands” of government websites being removed over the last couple of days, affecting information related to vaccines, veterans’ health care, substance abuse and Census Bureau data.
“Because, you know, there’s somehow DEI in the Census data,” Maddow said. “And as dumb as that is when it comes to scrubbing magic words from government documents, it’s dumb and cruel and perhaps irrevocably damaging when the same logic is being used as their means of targeting people.”
She concluded by saying that the Trump DEI purge is going after federal workers “who do not work in DEI.”
“I think it’s pretty obvious now to everybody that they are using DEI as just a pretext,” Maddow said. “They’re giving everything that, you know, unfashionable boogeyman label to try to avoid people in general realizing that what they’re really doing is just wrecking the U.S. government, just knocking it down.”
“That’s the point of all of this, whatever label they’re putting on it.”
Watch the clip below or at this link: