Trump is the poster child of DEI

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

It is taken as read that America’s next president is bad news for diversity, equity and inclusion — the now-ubiquitous shorthand for the notion that workplaces should be fair, encouraging and open to everyone.

Exhibit A is the executive order Donald Trump signed at the end of his previous term. It sought to end “employee trainings that use divisive propaganda to undermine the principle of fair and equal treatment for all”.

President Biden ditched M-20-37 as soon as he came to power. Four years on, Trump has another shot at implementation. Expect his signature on something soon — especially as loathing of DEI permeates his new inner circle.  

Cabinet nominees Pete Hegseth for defence secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Marco Rubio for secretary of state, have all railed against the policy as divisive.

Elon Musk hasn’t minced his words, either. “Diversity, equity and inclusion are propaganda words for racism, sexism and other -isms,” he wrote on X. He reckons the whole idea is “morally wrong” and “must DIE”. (See his clever twist on the acronym there?)

Musk’s co-head at a new department of efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, co-founded an asset manager devoted to driving “woke” policies from corporate life. Full disclosure: he once rang me to see if I’d help launch it in Europe.

Meanwhile back in June, vice-president elect JD Vance helped to introduce a bill called the Dismantle DEI Act.

How ironic. For surely the success of Team Trump is one of the best arguments in favour of diversity and inclusion ever made. The most powerful country on earth is about to be run by a cabal of narcissists, oddballs, geniuses and delusionals.

America could well be better off as a result. It requires a childlike sort of honesty to call out Europe’s woeful defence spending or criticise free trade for hollowing out US manufacturing. Likewise to harass China or believe it is possible to resolve global conflicts in 24 hours.

Want someone to cut bureaucracy rather than talk about it? Then you also need someone with an abnormal sort of single-mindedness. The kind of weirdo who believes in moving to Mars or drilling a tunnel under Los Angeles. And then delivers.

Trump’s provisional administration, not to mention his backers, are strewn with misfits who would struggle to make it through the first interview round at most modern organisations. Therein lies arguably the biggest hypocrisy in business. Companies say they value diversity and inclusiveness. But they don’t really.

This, I believe, is the reason for the DEI backlash. Businesses should cease paying lip service to diversity and inclusion when it is clear that they value conformity. Every reader of this column will know an amazing yet difficult colleague who got the sack for speaking up, disagreeing with superiors, working “differently” or not collaborating.

Homogeneity still dominates. So-called culture-carriers are celebrated and promoted. Around 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have made current or prospective employees take personality tests.

Imagine the founders of Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway doing a Myers-Briggs questionnaire? Cognitive outliers matter. The power of neurodiversity to problem-solve has been recognised for millennia.

Trouble is, so has our desire to conform, avoid confrontation and earn a living. I am doubtful that companies will ever truly be diverse. In my own experience, most colleagues I have thought exceptional were fired. Only the average thrived.

To be fair, for many industries this makes sense. No one needs mavericks overseeing IT projects or testing the breaking point of concrete.

But swaths of the knowledge economy can benefit from following Trump. To do so, DEI should obviously care about race and gender but prioritise differences in personality.

Hence, investment firm Azoria Partners’ new actively managed fund is misguided to exclude S&P 500 companies that champion diversity, full stop. And in its failed attempt to boost boardroom diversity via disclosure rules on women and minority directors, Nasdaq focused on the wrong thing.

It should help that, unlike their staff, up to one in five bosses have psychopathic traits themselves, according to research — as opposed to one in 100 in the general community. Another paper showed that psychopaths were more likely to be invited on management development programmes.

So there should be plenty of chief executives who are sympathetic to pushing diversity in all its forms. In the meantime, Republicans should cease trying to ditch the hand that made them and concentrate on inspiring the rest of us to follow suit. 

[email protected]