President Donald Trump’s administration has made it a top priority to remove anything associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from federal websites, regardless of the context. But in doing so, it’s erasing history—and making a compelling case for why we
shouldn’t be dismantling the Department of Education.
One glaring example of this is Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, which, in early March,
erroneously removed a historic image of the B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, from the Pentagon’s website. (The plane dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.) Why? Because the aircraft’s name contains the word “gay.”
This absurdity is a powerful illustration of how far Trump and his cronies will go in their quest to eliminate anything that might be construed as “inclusive.” But this particular flub reveals the administration’s true intentions: to distort historical facts for the sake of ideological purity.
More recently, on Tuesday, it was reported that the Defense Department
removed articles about the Navajo Code Talkers from its website, supposedly following a
directive from Trump and Hegseth to eliminate all DEI-related content from Pentagon and military sites.
As we’ve highlighted before, though, under Trump, DEI has been reduced to little more than a smokescreen. The term now serves as a tool for denying opportunities to people of color, women, and minorities—if not erasing them entirely from the history books.