Kim Jong Un stared blankly as I spoke.

The North Korean dictator was seated across a small table from President Donald Trump, the two leaders and their entourages tucked away in a meeting room of a luxury hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was their second summit, this one in February 2019—an event that the United States hoped would de-escalate the threat posed by the rogue nuclear nation, and one that Trump had told aides might yield him a Nobel Peace Prize. But I wanted to ask the president about something on the other side of the globe.

“Mr. President, do you have any reaction to Michael Cohen and his testimony?” I asked from a few feet away.

Trump scowled and shook his head. Kim didn’t react. The dozen other American reporters who were there and I were abruptly pulled from the room. And when the summit later adjourned without a deal, Trump blamed the stalled negotiations on the distractions caused by Cohen, his former lawyer, who had appeared before a Democratic-led congressional committee back in Washington hours earlier and delivered explosive testimony in which he labeled Trump a “racist,” “con man,” and “cheat.”

Trump later told aides on Air Force One that he didn’t like my question. And, certainly, he had the right to respond to it however he saw fit or to choose not to respond at all. But most important was that I had the ability to ask it at all—that a journalist, protected by the freedom of speech, could directly challenge the president about any subject of his or her choosing.

[Read: The day Trump became un-president]

I was able to do so that day only because I was part of what’s known as the White House press pool. Established during the Eisenhower administration, the pool is a small, rotating group of journalists who stand in for the rest of the press corps when security or space limitations prevent a larger number of reporters and photographers from being present—for example, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or, in this case, in a small room in Vietnam. Across generations of Democratic and Republican presidencies, the pool system has, with remarkable speed, kept the American public informed about what the president is doing on a daily basis.

In his first term, Trump went along with the system. But this week he made clear that he no longer would: The White House press secretary announced that the administration would disband the daily rotation, long coordinated by the White House Correspondents’ Association, and instead handpick which journalists would be allowed to follow the president.

That change might seem trivial to many Americans—just a Beltway-insider controversy or a fight among celebrity correspondents jockeying over who has access to the president. But it represents a dangerous moment for American democracy. If, as it has begun to do, the White House gives preference to Trump-friendly outlets, it will restrict the ability of fair, independent journalists to hold some of the most powerful people on the planet to account and to expose the president’s actions and decisions.

“Our job is to push the president beyond his comfort space to respond to questions that otherwise they’re never asked,” Peter Baker, the longtime New York Times correspondent who has covered the White House since 1996, told me. “Now he’s sending a signal that If you write something we don’t like, you’re out. You don’t get to be here anymore.”

The announcement this week follows the White House’s recent banishment of the Associated Press from the pool and White House events after the outlet refused to go along with Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” AP journalists have been allowed to keep their hard passes, security clearances that allow them access to the White House campus. But they are clearly being punished by the president for the words they use to cover him. The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the journalists who report on the day-to-day doings of the president and works with the West Wing to facilitate press access, objected to the decision. The AP, in a statement, said the move “plainly violates the First Amendment” and is suing the White House over the ban; a federal judge this week did not offer an immediate ruling but also did not restore the outlet’s access, causing the Trump administration to claim “victory.” (I worked at the AP for eight years, including while on that presidential trip to Vietnam, and am a member of the WHCA.)

[Read: Intimidating Americans will not work]

By overriding the entire pool system, the White House has now gone one step further. The WHCA represents nearly 300 news organizations—from a wide range of ideological viewpoints, including conservative ones—that are accredited to cover the president. It has long determined the identities of the outlets and reporters in the pool with no input from the White House. About three dozen outlets rotate, on an alphabetical basis, pool duties at the White House; a smaller number participate in what’s known as the travel pool, following the president when he leaves White House grounds, because of the costs involved. (The media organizations themselves cover those costs, not taxpayers.) When he travels, 13 journalists—a mix of correspondents, photographers, and technicians—go along with him (because that’s how many seats are in the press cabin of Air Force One). When the president is at the White House, the number increases slightly. In both cases, those in the pool send out information through reports that are distributed directly to the other members of the WHCA.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House would no longer use the WHCA’s rotation. The next day, Reuters joined AP in losing its scheduled shift; Blaze Media, a conservative outlet making its debut in the pool, and Axios—one of the few outlets to adopt the “Gulf of America” name—were allowed in. Today, two more partisan, right-leaning outlets—One America News and The Federalist—received pool slots. And a reporter from the Russian state news agency TASS was allowed to gain access to today’s Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the AP and Reuters were not. That reporter was later removed by staffers for “not being on the approved list,” according to the White House.

“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” Eugene Daniels, the president of WHCA’s board and a Politico correspondent soon leaving to host an MSNBC show, said in a statement earlier this week. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The mere presence of the pool is important; its reporters stand poised at just about any moment to provide the nation with real-time updates on the president’s actions and health. The pool is there if the president travels to Boston or Beijing or just up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. It has been on hand for some of the nation’s most historic moments, including when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and when George W. Bush was scrambled into the Florida skies after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center. It has been there when presidents made unannounced trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. And it’s there for mundane moments too, with reporters sometimes sitting for hours in vans while the president golfs.

The pool’s purpose is not just stenography about what the president says or a daily diary of what he does. Pool reports, compiled by independent journalists and untouched by any government officials, are often full of answers to unsparing questions posed by pool reporters. Trump feeds off media attention and, at times, enjoys going back and forth with reporters. He is accessible to the press and answers far more questions than his immediate predecessors. But most of the questions he fields are in spontaneous sessions with members of the pool, in the Oval Office, in the Cabinet room, or on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. He takes far fewer questions in larger news-conference settings with the full press corps, and he doesn’t regularly sit for one-on-one interviews other than with friendly, right-leaning interlocutors.

If the pool is now stacked with right-wing journalists, Trump will face fewer challenging questions, a blow to transparency and Americans’ ability to keep tabs on the most powerful person in their government. Ron Fournier, who covered the White House for the AP for more than a decade beginning in 1993, described such a system to me as “state media.”

[Read: The free-speech phonies]

“That is not a democracy,” Fournier said. “If this precedent holds, every future president will want the same deal.”

The changes to the pool system are all the more worrying because they are part of a larger attack on the press from the White House. No president likes his media coverage, but no one before Trump has made the press such a part of the story. Trump has long deemed journalists “the enemy of the people” while deriding institutions and individual reporters (me included), and he has successfully inspired fear in the Fourth Estate. His litigation prompted ABC to pay $15 million to his presidential library in a settlement. His Federal Communications Commission has opened investigations into PBS, NPR, and the parent company of NBC. Trump threatened this week to sue members of the media over anonymous sources, claiming that “a big price” should be paid for stories he doesn’t like. The Pentagon has told reporters that it will eliminate its own pool that travels with the defense secretary. And before taking office, Trump’s FBI director mused about targeting journalists he believes have covered the president unfairly.

The WHCA circulated a letter this week that was signed by 39 outlets protesting the changes to the pool. Some right-leaning organizations, such as Fox News and Newsmax, signed the letter, warning that a future Democratic president might exclude conservative media outlets. Newsmax’s owner, Chris Ruddy, made that case to Leavitt yesterday, a person familiar with the meeting told me. The press secretary was unmoved by the argument, the person said. (Ruddy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) She has stated publicly that the changes to the pool will allow a more diverse set of outlets to cover the president. In response to a social-media post from Baker, the New York Times correspondent, criticizing the move, Leavitt wrote, “Gone are the days where left-wing stenographers posing as journalists, such as yourself, dictate who gets to ask what.”

Members of the WHCA board continued negotiations with the White House yesterday. Reporters have speculated that Trump will get bored of softball questions from friendly outlets or that the White House will tire of shouldering the logistics of staging press events without the WHCA’s help. Some of the White House correspondents I have talked to in recent days have floated the idea of boycotting covering Trump events in protest, but others, including members of TV networks, have pushed back on the idea. Among the fears: that a boycott could cause the White House to fully stock the pool with sycophantic outlets, or to disband it completely.

Some rank-and-file WHCA members have also advocated for canceling the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual black-tie celebration of the First Amendment scheduled for late April, because of the bad optics that would be produced by scenes of correspondents mingling with administration officials who have cut back on press access. But calling off the event would deprive the organization of its best yearly opportunity to raise money for journalism scholarships and operating expenses. For now, the dinner is on.

Although presidents are always invited, Trump did not attend the event during any of his first four years in office. A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, told me that Trump had not decided whether to attend this year’s dinner, but that many of his aides were urging him to go—“to make clear that he owns you.”

On President Donald Trump’s first day back in the White House, he issued an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government. Its sweeping language forbids DEI “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities,” and orders the termination of all DEI positions—hundreds if not thousands of roles. Trump and his allies are also trying to curtail DEI in corporations that contract with the state, colleges that get federal funds, and more.

The ambition of these anti-DEI efforts mirrors the earlier, heavy-handed push, including by the Biden administration, to embed DEI practices into almost all of America’s most important institutions. It also underscores just how widely and variably the term DEI is now used across society.

Americans have developed a bad habit of deploying DEI as if it has a clear meaning. The left’s elites praise DEI. The right’s elites attack DEI. Citizens debate DEI on social media. But often, they are talking about different things. Almost as often, they don’t notice that they are talking about different things. These failures to communicate flow from the fact that DEI has no universal or broadly shared definition.

[Josh Barro: Democrats need to clean house]

To a debilitating degree, the DEI debate is defined by Americans talking past one another, when instead they could use more particular language to describe their positions. Specificity would make it harder for any faction to impose its most radical ideas.

The problem with DEI begins with its most basic definition: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Each of those terms can be defined in conflicting ways. For example, the Los Angeles public school system, which admits and teaches any child who enrolls, and Yale University, which deliberately rejects the overwhelming majority of its applicants, both claim “inclusion” as a core value. The trio of terms can be in tension with one another, too; Harvard pursued diversity in admissions, for example, by systematically treating Asian applicants inequitably. Yet after the summer of 2020, many institutions embraced DEI as a bundle—as if it were a single ethos. Among the entities that began touting that ethos were Amnesty International and the CIA, Philip Morris and the American Lung Association, the Catholic Church and NARAL Pro-Choice America, NASDAQ and the Bernie Sanders campaign.

In my reporting, I’ve encountered efforts dubbed “DEI” that have attracted little resistance, such as orchestras holding auditions behind a screen to avoid bias, or analyses of payrolls meant to ensure that men and women doing the same jobs were getting equal pay. I’ve also encountered efforts, particularly in higher education and nonprofits, that both liberals and conservatives spoke out against as coercive, retrograde, or nonsensical.

In the past, when DEI had more positive connotations, its vagueness gave the left cover to implement ideas that would have risked rejection if evaluated on their own specific terms. The DEI label failed to distinguish policies that aroused little opposition, such as Pride Month anti-bullying campaigns, from policies that were unpopular, such as allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams; policies that yielded a clear benefit, such as accommodating a disability, from policies long judged by scholars to be ineffective, such as workplace training sessions on race; and policies that were lawful from legally dubious policies, such as ideological litmus tests for professors at public colleges.

Over time, DEI grew into a multibillion-dollar industry. It purported to help marginalized people, yet directed most of its revenue and other benefits to members of the professional class. And even unpopular DEI initiatives persisted in institutions and spread to new ones because skeptics were scared: To critique anything called “DEI” was to risk being seen as antagonistic to progressives’ sacred values or being called out as a problematic bigot or even being fired.

[George Packer: The moral case against equity language]

A backlash was inevitable. And the failure of many DEI advocates to distinguish between the most and least sensible things done in its name laid the groundwork for the Trump coalition to go to the opposite extreme: Today’s undifferentiated attacks on “DEI” are as vague and ill-defined as statements of undifferentiated support for it.

That vagueness is allowing the right to conflate reining in “woke” excesses with nixing programs that most people support, such as outlays to train more special-education teachers, and programs that reflect values that most people share, such as National Guard participation in a Frederick Douglass parade. Some worry that Trump will even gut civil-rights enforcement under cover of an attack on DEI. At the very least, the label conflates distinct policies—say, racial quotas in hiring, on the one hand, and recruitment at historically Black colleges, on the other—that ought to be judged separately, given their different moral, practical, and legal implications.

If the MAGA right proves as unwilling to draw sensible distinctions as the woke left was, it, too, will provoke a backlash. Even the anti-woke conservative pundit Tomi Lahren recently wrote that “conservatives would do better not to immediately label anything and everything a product of DEI. It cheapens the argument to throw it around as a catch all.”

Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance recently participated in a culture-war fight that illustrates how the term DEI muddies more than it clarifies in civic discourse. After an airliner and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River in January, both men speculated that DEI played a role in the crash, inspiring countless social-media arguments. Trump and Vance, in fact, were making completely different claims from each other. Vance, unlike Trump, made a legitimate point about problems with the FAA’s hiring practices. But if he wanted to convince the American public, including people on the left, that those specific practices were flawed, his blanket disparagement of them as “DEI” didn’t help his cause.

In a press conference the morning after the crash, Trump asserted that “diversity-and-inclusion hiring” was a factor in the accident. Many people thought Trump was assigning fault to someone supposedly hired because of their race or gender. But the text of that Trump appearance suggests that he was thinking of disability: The Federal Aviation Administration was “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions,” Trump said. (In 2019, the FAA announced “a pilot program to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations.” Trump was the president at the time. No evidence suggests that disability played a role in the Potomac crash.)

A few days later, a Fox News interviewer asked Vance, “Do you have any evidence that any of those hires that were there at the controls Wednesday night were DEI hires?” Vance replied, “This is not saying that the person who was at the controls is a DEI hire. We should investigate everything, but let’s just say the person at the controls didn’t have enough staffing around him or her because we were turning people away because of DEI reasons.” Vance added, “DEI policies have led our air-traffic controllers to be short-staffed.” That staffing crisis is acute. And although the Potomac River crash has not been conclusively linked to it, the Associated Press obtained an FAA report stating that, at the time of the crash, “one air-traffic controller was working two positions.” According to The New York Times, the control tower at Reagan National Airport was “nearly a third below targeted staff levels.”

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

From Vance’s broad label of “DEI,” no one would guess the details of the FAA’s hiring practices for air-traffic controllers. He seems to have been referring to a controversy that arose in the Obama era. Until 2013, a civilian who wanted to become an air-traffic controller would complete a classroom program and take an aptitude test measuring ability with numbers, problem-solving, tolerance for high-intensity moments, and more. In response to a push from the Obama administration to diversify federal agencies, the FAA added a new requirement in 2014: a “biographical” assessment. Any applicant who failed to score enough points on it would be ineligible to be hired.

The strangeness of the questionnaire, which was later made public in court documents, is captured by this question from it:

The high school subject in which I received my lowest grade was:

Science Math English History/Social Sciences Physical education

The way the question was scored was not intuitive. Applicants received 15 points if they chose “A) Science.” All other answers received zero points. When scoring a questionnaire put in place to help advance diversity, the FAA apparently decided to reward poor performance in science. Another question asked about the number of college credit hours the applicant had taken in art, music, dance, or drama, and the scoring was even less intuitive. “Did not attend college” got zero points. “Zero credit hours” got five points. One to six credit hours also got zero points. Seven to 12 credit hours got four points. If you chose 13 or more credit hours, you got one point.

Almost 90 percent of applicants failed to pass the assessment. At least 1,000 qualified applicants were denied the chance to enter the profession due to the new hurdle, according to a lawsuit filed against the FAA. (The FAA has contested the suit, which is ongoing.) And once aspiring air-traffic controllers realized that they could be disqualified by a bizarre test, many ceased investing time and money in air-traffic-controller classes, and enrollment declined. In 2016, Congress passed a law banning the use of the biographical assessment.

Jack Despain Zhou, a former Air Force analyst who has done extensive reporting on the matter, has written that the episode was “one of the clearest and most pressing causes” for the air-traffic-controller shortage, because “as a direct result of it, the air-traffic control hiring pipeline was shattered.” Vance seems to have reached a similar conclusion. He is on solid ground in claiming that changes to hiring once made in the name of diversity cost the FAA qualified air-traffic controllers. But his use of “DEI” as shorthand for what went wrong was a vague, needlessly polarizing way to make his point, and failed to give his audience enough information about what happened to judge for themselves. I described the bizarre test and the context for it to several progressive friends who think of themselves as DEI supporters. All thought the test sounded nonsensical, not like something they’d defend.

[Adam Serwer: The great resegregation]

In this and other culture-war debates about DEI, rival camps would find more common ground if everyone avoided framing everything at the highest levels of abstraction. The question “Should we have DEI at the FAA?” is maximally polarizing. A less polarizing question might be: “What are fair test questions for aspiring air-traffic controllers?” Even a question that divides Americans, such as “Does racial diversity at the FAA matter?,” is at least specific enough to permit a debate on the merits, in which everyone understands what’s actually up for discussion.

In the board game Taboo, a player tries to get a partner to guess a given word, such as margarita, without saying tequila, lime, salt, skinny, or frozen. She might hint: “Mexican restaurants discount this drink on Mondays,” or “Jimmy Buffett got rich singing about this citrusy cocktail”––avoiding the “taboo” words. The AI researcher and writer Eliezer Yudkowsky urges “tabooing” words to help clarify their meaning. “When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all,” he has written. Simply “blank out the forbidden words and all their obvious synonyms,” he advised, and summon “the actual details” until you can replace the symbols with the substance.

To achieve the rigor of specificity, more Americans—from elected officials to university administrators to citizens debating on social media—should “taboo” DEI, as well as diversity and equity and inclusion. Doing so would force us to better understand our own claims and to make them more legible. It would help us better understand what others think, and to achieve sensible policies rather than careening between totalizing extremes.