In the wake of the catastrophic plane and helicopter collision over the Potomac in January, Donald Trump spoke to the nation—not to offer words of consolation or comfort, but to blame diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs for the tragedy. By turning instantly to racism, Trump skirted some difficult issues about America’s worst commercial aviation disaster in 16 years. Like the fact that just nine days earlier, Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Whitaker had resigned after months of public pressure by Trump’s deputy president, Elon Musk. Or that Trump had issued a federal employee hiring freeze that failed to include an explicit carve-out for air traffic controllers, a profession that’s been understaffed since the pandemic. Or that 24 hours after the crash, FAA employees were sent an e-mail containing buyout offers and the suggestion that they “find a job in the private sector.” Or that Trump had gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee the day after his inauguration.

Instead, Trump chose to eke out a little more mileage from DEI, the right’s current favorite racist bugaboo. In recent years, conservatives have twisted the term into shorthand for the idea that unqualified and unfit Black folks—and, when convenient, women and other gender and racial minorities—are undeservedly elevated to roles for which white men were denied the right of first and last refusal. JD Vance even claimed that DEI “puts stress on the people who are already there,” which, as columnist Ed Kilgore has noted, suggests “that even if a white man were responsible for the crash, it was probably a white man ‘stressed’ by DEI practices.”

DEI was always just an effort to ensure that qualified members of underrepresented groups had access to opportunities historically denied to them. But here’s Trump and Musk, asserting that white men succeed purely on “merit” and presumably considering themselves living proof. The former, a man who looked directly into a solar eclipse; the latter, the heir to an apartheid emerald mine who was allegedly doing so much “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine” that it worried his board members at Tesla and SpaceX, per The Wall Street Journal.

The good news for MAGA is that DEI is dead. Trump signed a slew of executive orders to purge it from both the public and private sector—even making a big show of signing an anti-DEI order aimed at the FAA after the Potomac crash. He also revoked the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity rule that prohibited government contractors from discriminating on the basis of race or gender.

The bad news? The rest of us are about to reap the consequences of unrestrained white mediocrity. Take the new, DEI-less FAA. As of this writing, there have been at least five more plane accidents since the Potomac crash. It’s almost as if DEI was the only thing keeping the planes in the sky.

Or check out Trump appointees like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. His predecessor was Lloyd Austin, a Silver Star awardee with more than four decades of military experience. Hegseth’s résumé includes being ousted as the head of not one but two veterans’ advocacy groups because of “allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct,” according to The New Yorker. During his confirmation hearing, he dodged questions about whether he would follow unlawful directives from Trump to shoot protesters. According to Senator Tammy Duckworth, another Army veteran, Hegseth didn’t know the most “basic, 101 stuff for someone who wants to be secretary of defense.”

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Or what about Edward Coristine, a main character in Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency? Coristine is 19, graduated high school in 2024, goes by “Big Balls” online, and is now a senior adviser at both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. Coristine and five other DOGE employees whose ages top out at 24 were allowed access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, making them privy to millions of Americans’ most sensitive private data. (A judge temporarily blocked this, but the data could still have been scraped.) Did I mention that Coristine was fired from his last internship for leaking company secrets? What could possibly go wrong?

The list goes on. Does anyone really think Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the poster child for “I did my own research,” is going to be a great steward of America’s healthcare agency? Or that Project 2025 coauthor Russell Vought should have discretion over federal spending as head of the Office of Management and Budget? Or that Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, both of whom have been derided by scores of national security officials, can be trusted to run our intelligence agencies or the FBI?

A lot of people who voted to hurt others will learn that when a tech billionaire and a known real estate scammer unite to wreck the government, the resulting harm will extend far beyond the presumed beneficiaries of DEI.

If anti-DEI farmers don’t care about the global death toll resulting from the demise of the US Agency for International Development, which sourced 41 percent of its food aid from US farms, they will care about the roughly $2 billion in lost food sales. If Trump voters don’t care about Vought’s slashing of workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, perhaps they will care about the wanton financial fraud inflicted by mortgage companies and banks. If conspiracists support Trump’s gag orders on the CDC and withdrawal from the World Health Organization, they might care about outbreaks of tuberculosis and a quickly morphing bird flu virus. And if they still haven’t bothered to look up how tariffs work, maybe they’ll get interested if the $800 tax increase predicted by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation hits home.

Or maybe those people will look at the destruction to themselves and the country and still take pride in the fact that trans girls can’t play girls’ sports and airplane pilots keep getting whiter.