The Trump administration has spent years warning America about DEI. According to the sales pitch, diversity programs were putting unqualified people into important jobs while qualified people were being pushed aside.
After watching the White House social-media operation this week, I believe they may have identified a genuine problem. They just got the initials wrong.
Around this White House, DEI apparently stands for Definitely Employing Idiots.
Consider Monday’s contribution to American civilization.
The official White House account took The Magic School Bus, the children’s program in which Ms. Frizzle teaches kids about science, and transformed it into “The Magic Deportation Bus.” The altered image showed Ms. Frizzle driving while people portrayed as immigrants sat behind her, some apparently handcuffed. The White House used it to promote an ICE operation that resulted in 1,328 arrests in Virginia and Maryland.
Somewhere in Washington there is apparently a room full of highly paid people whose principal qualification is access to Canva.
You can disagree about immigration policy. You can favor deportations. You can favor more immigration. You can argue about the border until the cows come home, discover they lack the proper paperwork, and deport the cows.
But somebody in the White House looked at a children’s cartoon and thought, You know what would make this funnier? Handcuffs.
This was not somebody’s anonymous Facebook meme posted from the spare bedroom after three beers. This was the official White House of the United States of America.
George Washington crossed the Delaware. Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address. Franklin Roosevelt told Americans the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.
The Trump White House gave us the Magic Deportation Bus.
You might think the federal government would need several days to recover from that intellectual achievement.
It needed two.
On Wednesday, the official Department of Education account posted a 19-second video intended to make Donald Trump look strong. It began with Gary Oldman portraying Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, declaring that you cannot negotiate with a tiger when your head is already in its mouth. Then came the dramatic Trump footage, accompanied by the department’s proud caption: “No one does it like us” and a tiger emoji.
There was one small problem.
The tiger was Adolf Hitler.
The scene is about Churchill rejecting negotiations with Nazi Germany. The Department of Education had taken a movie clip in which Churchill was talking about Hitler and edited Trump into the role of the tiger.
This is the sort of mistake that makes you wonder whether the Department of Education has considered applying to the Department of Education.
People on social media began pointing out the history lesson. A Community Note supplied additional context. The department soon deleted the post.
There is something almost beautiful about it.
For years, Trump supporters have complained bitterly whenever critics compare Trump to Hitler. Then Trump’s own Department of Education managed to do it accidentally while trying to praise him.
You cannot buy comedy like that.
Well, apparently taxpayers can.
And remember, this administration has repeatedly celebrated the destruction of DEI and the restoration of merit. No more hiring people for reasons other than competence, we were told. America’s best and brightest were finally going to be running things again.
Excellent.
Whoever created the Department of Education video apparently did not know enough twentieth-century history to understand a scene from one of the most famous movies about Winston Churchill.
And whoever approved the Magic Deportation Bus apparently possessed the political judgment of a seventh grader who has just discovered Photoshop.
If these are the merit hires, maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on diversity.
The funniest part is that neither blunder required sophisticated knowledge.
Nobody had to calculate the national debt. Nobody had to negotiate a nuclear treaty. Nobody had to explain quantum mechanics.
One assignment was essentially:
Watch the movie clip before posting it.
The other was:
Perhaps don’t turn a children’s educational cartoon into a deportation joke.
Washington’s new meritocracy went 0-for-2.
The people responsible will probably survive. Somebody may even get promoted. In government, as in certain family businesses, identifying the owner’s sense of humor can occasionally be more useful than identifying Adolf Hitler.
And that may be the real lesson here.
The Trump administration didn’t eliminate DEI.
It merely redefined it.
Definitely Employing Idiots.
