President Trump launched a war on DEI the minute he took office in January.
Corporate America scrambled to figure out how to respond.
And a New York Times reporter just admitted Trump created something Democrats never saw coming.
Trump's executive orders sparked corporate DEI exodus
Donald Trump signed executive orders on his first day back in office terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government.
The orders went far beyond Washington, D.C. bureaucrats.
Trump rescinded Executive Order 11246 from the Johnson Administration that required federal contractors to implement affirmative action programs.¹
The new orders require federal contractors to certify they don't operate illegal DEI programs and opens them up to criminal prosecution under the False Claims Act if they violate federal anti-discrimination laws.²
Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the Justice Department to investigate up to nine private sector companies with "egregious and discriminatory" DEI programs.³
Within weeks, America's biggest corporations started dismantling DEI infrastructure they'd built over five years.
Meta eliminated its dedicated DEI team and ended supplier diversity efforts.⁴
Amazon cut DEI language from its website after pledging in 2020 to double Black employees in senior roles.⁵
Target concluded its three-year DEI goals and stopped participating in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index.⁶
McDonald's renamed its diversity team the "Global Inclusion Team" and stopped tracking representation goals.⁷
The dominoes kept falling.
Walmart eliminated race and gender as factors in supplier contracts.⁸
Goldman Sachs ended its requirement that corporate boards include women and minorities.⁹
Boeing dissolved its entire DEI department.¹⁰
New York Times correspondent reveals Trump's cultural transformation
Peter Baker covers the White House for the New York Times and appeared on PBS's Washington Week to discuss Project 2025 implementation.
Host Jeffrey Goldberg asked about Trump's war on DEI programs.
Baker admitted Trump achieved something remarkable in less than a year.
"One of the things that they've been very successful at, and I would expect to see more of, is their war on DEI, on the notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the notion that diversity is an admirable goal, even if you don't necessarily want quotas," Baker explained.¹¹
"They have managed in just a very short amount of time to create a new culture in the country, not just in the government, across the board where private employers feel the need to retreat from DEI," he added.¹²
Baker's admission is stunning coming from the chief White House correspondent at America's most influential liberal newspaper.
Trump didn't just change government policy.
He shifted the entire corporate culture without Congress passing a single law.
Private companies that never took federal dollars are abandoning DEI because Trump made it politically and legally toxic.
Media catches up to reality conservatives predicted
Baker acknowledged the obvious backlash against Democrat identity politics.
"To be fair, the Democrats, according to polls at least, have gone too far in the identity politics area," Goldberg said.¹³
"There's a backlash by people who feel like things got crazy," Baker agreed.¹⁴
He shared a telling anecdote about focus group research.
"I talked to a young pollster, a college pollster who asked people in New York at a focus group, what word do you associate with the Democratic Party?" Baker recounted. "He says, H.R. department."¹⁵
That's the perfect description of what happened to Democrats.
They became the party of corporate diversity training, pronouns in email signatures, and checking boxes for victim status.
Normal Americans who work for a living watched their employers force them through humiliating DEI sessions where they had to confess their privilege and learn about systemic racism.
Trump tapped into that resentment and gave business leaders permission to end the madness.
Companies are voting with their policies even though Trump's executive orders don't legally require private businesses to abandon DEI.
The threat of Justice Department investigations and losing federal contracts was enough to trigger the corporate exodus.
But Baker warned Trump might be pushing too far with some symbolic actions.
He pointed to eliminating Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a free admission day at national parks in favor of Trump's birthday on Flag Day.¹⁶
"At some point, the question is, do people, and this is a very multicultural country at some point, does that begin to go too far for people and by the midterms? We'll see," Baker said.¹⁷
Conservatives would argue there's nothing "too far" about ending racial discrimination dressed up as diversity and treating Americans equally regardless of race.
Trump's DEI crackdown represents the biggest rollback of racial preferences since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Democrats spent decades building the infrastructure to discriminate based on race and sex while claiming they were fighting discrimination.
Trump dismantled it in less than a year without needing Congress.
¹ Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, "DEI Under Siege: A Guide to the Trump Executive Orders," Skadden Insights, February 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ TechTarget, "What companies are rolling back DEI policies in 2025?," TechTarget, 2025.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Fortune, "Fortune 500 companies like Meta and Target are rolling back DEI," Fortune, March 6, 2025.
⁷ TechTarget, "What companies are rolling back DEI policies in 2025?," TechTarget, 2025.
⁸ UNLEASH, "DEI: Which companies have rolled back their commitments?," UNLEASH, May 28, 2025.
⁹ Axios, "Which companies are rolling back DEI and which are standing firm," Axios, February 11, 2025.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ RealClearPolitics, "Peter Baker: Trump Created A New Culture Where Private Employers Feel The Need To Retreat From DEI," RealClearPolitics, December 27, 2025.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Ibid.
¹⁴ Ibid.
¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ Ibid.
