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At least the Oval Office meeting held by President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was held in front of the cameras. False friendliness in public by Trump and Vance, followed by behind-the-scenes treachery, would have been much more dangerous to the Ukrainian cause.

Instead, Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.

Today’s meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration’s policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided. Trump and Vance displayed in the Oval Office a highly personal hatred. There was no effort here to make a case for American interests. Vance complained that Zelensky had traveled to Pennsylvania to thank U.S. ammunition workers, because, Vance charged, the appearance amounted to campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump angrily explained. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator.

Through the Cold War period, Americans were haunted by the fear that a person with clandestine loyalties to a hostile foreign power might somehow rise to high office. In the late 1940s, the Alger Hiss case convulsed the country. Hiss’s accusers charged—and it later proved true—that Hiss had betrayed U.S. secrets to Soviet spymasters in the 1930s, when Hiss served as a junior official in the Department of Agriculture. The secrets were not very important; they included designs for a new fire extinguisher for U.S. naval ships. But Hiss himself was a rising star. The possibility that a person with such secrets in his past might someday go on to head the Department of State or Central Intelligence Agency once tormented Americans.

But what if the loyalties were not clandestine, not secret? What if a leader just plain blurted out on national television that he despises our allies, rejects treaties, and regards a foreign adversary as a personal friend? What if he did it again and again? Human beings get used to anything. But this?

It’s not hard to imagine a president of Estonia or Moldova in that Oval Office chair, being berated by Trump and Vance. Or a president of Taiwan. Or, for that matter, the leaders of core U.S. partners such as Germany and Japan, which entrusted their nations’ security to the faith and patriotism of past American leaders, only to be confronted by the faithless men who hold the highest offices today.

We’re witnessing the self-sabotage of the United States. “America First” always meant America alone, a predatory America whose role in the world is no longer based on democratic belief. America voted at the United Nations earlier this week against Ukraine, siding with Russia and China against almost all of its fellow democracies. Is this who Americans want to be? For this is what America is being turned into.

The Trump administration’s elimination of PEPFAR, the American program to combat HIV infection in Africa, symbolizes the path ahead. President George W. Bush created the program because it would do immense good at low cost, and thereby demonstrate to the world the moral basis of American power. His successors continued it, and Congresses of both parties funded it, because they saw that the program advanced both U.S. values and U.S. interests. Trump and Vance don’t want the United States to be that kind of country anymore.

American allies urgently need a Plan B for collective security in a world where the U.S. administration prefers Vladimir Putin to Zelensky.

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name—and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person. When Vance executed his personal pivot from Never Trump to Always Trump, he needed a way to prove that he had truly crossed over to the dark side beyond any possibility of reversion or redemption; perhaps his support for Russia allowed him to do that. But however shallow their motives, the consequences are profound.

In his first term, Trump sometimes seemed a rogue actor within his own administration. The president expressed strange and disquieting opinions, but his Cabinet secretaries were mostly normal and responsible people. The oddball appointees on the White House staff were contained by the many more-or-less normal appointees. This time, Trump is building a national-security system to follow his lead. He has intimidated or persuaded his caucus in the House to accept—and his caucus in the Senate not to oppose—his pro-authoritarian agenda.

The good and great America that once inspired global admiration—that good and great America still lives. But it no longer commands a consensus above party. The pro-Trump party exposed its face to the world in the Oval Office today. Nobody who saw that face will ever forget the grotesque sight.

Updated at 11:13 a.m. ET on March 1, 2025

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.

Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio—in theory, America’s top diplomat—was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

[Read: At least now we know the truth]

Zelensky objected, as he should have, when the vice president castigated the Ukrainian president for not showing enough personal gratitude to Trump. And then in a moment of immense hypocrisy, Vance told Zelensky that it was “disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.” But baiting Zelensky into fighting in front of the media was likely the plan all along, and Trump and Vance were soon both yelling at Zelensky. (“This is going to be great television,” Trump said during the meeting.) The president at times sounded like a Mafia boss—“You don’t have the cards”; “you’re buried there”—but in the end, he sounded like no one so much as Putin himself as he hollered about “gambling with World War III,” as if starting the biggest war in Europe in nearly a century was Zelensky’s idea.

After the meeting, Trump dismissed the Ukrainian leader and then issued a statement that could only have pleased Moscow:

I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.

Trump might as well have dictated this post on Truth Social before the meeting, because Zelensky didn’t stand a chance of having an actual discussion at the White House. When he showed Trump pictures of brutalized Ukrainian soldiers, Trump shrugged. “That’s tough stuff,” he muttered. Perhaps someone told Zelensky that Trump doesn’t read much, and reacts to images, but Trump, uncharacteristically, seems to have been determined to stay on message and pick a fight.

Vance, for his part, fully inhabited the role of a smarmy talk-show sidekick, jumping in to make sure the star got the support he needed while slamming one of the guests. The vice president is an unserious man who tries to insert himself into serious moments, but this time the stakes were much higher than the usual dustups with the media or congressional Democrats. He chuckled as Brian Glenn, a journalist from the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice who is reportedly dating Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, asked Zelensky the tough and incisive question of why he had not worn a suit in the Oval Office. (Perhaps he’ll ask Musk why he wore a hat and T-shirt to a Cabinet meeting, but I doubt it.)

The sheer rudeness shown to a foreign guest and friend of the United States was (to use a word) deplorable as a matter of manners and grace, but worse, Trump and Vance acted like a couple of online Kremlin sock puppets instead of American leaders. They pushed talking points that they either knew or should have known were wrong. Even if Zelensky were as fluent and capable in English as Winston Churchill, he would never have been able to rebut the flood of falsehoods. No, the U.S. has not given Ukraine $350 billion; yes, Zelensky has repeatedly expressed his thanks to America and to Trump; no, Zelensky was not attacking the administration. The Ukrainian leader did his best to stand up to the bullying, but Trump and Vance were playing to the cameras and the MAGA gallery at home.

Vance showed how dedicated he was to point-scoring rather than policy making with an observation so shallow that he was lucky that Zelensky was too off-balance to call him out for it. To emphasize Ukraine’s perilous situation, Vance noted that Zelensky was sending conscripts to the front lines, as if this was an unprecedented policy that only the most desperate regime would dare enact. Zelensky said that all nations at war have problems, but he might have pointed out to Vance that Ukraine is fighting for its very existence, while the United States has dragged conscripts to places far from home—including Korea and Vietnam—to fight against troops supported by the Kremlin.

[Tom Nichols: Don’t blame Zelensky]

Today’s meeting and America’s shameful vote in the United Nations on Monday confirmed that the United States is now aligned with Russia and against Ukraine, Europe, and most of the planet. I felt physically sick watching the president of the United States yell at a brave ally, fulminating in the Oval Office as if he were an addled old man shaking his fist at a television. Zelensky has endured tragedies, and risked his life, in ways that men such as Trump and Vance cannot imagine. (Vance served as a public-relations officer in the most powerful military in the world; he has never had to huddle in a bunker during a Russian bombardment.) I am ashamed for my nation; even if Congress acts to support and aid Ukraine, it cannot restore the American honor lost today.

But no matter how disgusted anyone might be at Trump and Vance’s behavior, the strategic reality is that this meeting is a catastrophe for the United States and the free world. America’s alliances are now in danger, and should be: Trump is openly, and gleefully, betraying everything America has tried to defend since the defeat of the Axis 80 years ago. The entire international order of peace and security is now in danger, as Russian autocrats, after slaughtering innocent people for three years, look forward to enjoying the spoils of their invasion instead of standing trial for their crimes. (Shortly after Trump dismissed Zelensky from the White House, Putin’s homunculus, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, posted on X: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.”)

Friday, February 28, 2025, will go into the history books as one of the grimmest days in American diplomacy, the beginning of a long-term disaster that every American, every U.S. ally, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy will have to endure. With the White House’s betrayal of Ukraine capping a month of authoritarian chaos in America, Putin, along with other dictators around the world, can finally look at Trump with confidence and think: one of us.

This article previously misstated J. D. Vance’s former military role.

Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event.

Then Trump explained just why he deemed such an event so unlikely. “They respect me,” he thundered. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching for Putin’s character.

In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning.

Conservatives have invested even more heavily in denying any basis for the Trump-Russia scandal. A handful of MAGA devotees have openly endorsed Russian propaganda, but more Republicans have explained away Trump’s behavior as reflecting some motivation other than outright sympathy for Moscow: He is transactional, he is a nationalist, he admires strength and holds weakness in contempt.

And it is all true: Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for American foreign policy. But many Republicans who acknowledged these traits nonetheless believed that Trump could be persuaded to stay in Ukraine’s corner. They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that, in addition to his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin and Russia.

Immediately after Zelensky left the Oval Office, Trump posted to Truth Social, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved.” The clear implication is that the United States will cut off its support for the Ukrainian war effort. Trump’s allies have already tried to foist the blame for that momentous decision onto Zelensky. Trump “felt disrespected” by the Ukrainian leader’s body language and argumentative manner, White House officials told Fox News. “Zelensky was in a terrible position,” National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry acknowledged on X, “but he never should have gotten sucked into making argumentative points.” And, he added, “he should have worn a suit.”

All of this ignores the much more plausible explanation of what happened today: It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.

In the past few weeks, Trump has made very little effort to conceal his pro-Russian tilt. He called Zelensky a dictator, and when asked if he would say the same about Putin, refused, insisting, “I don’t use those words lightly.” (No president in American history has used words more lightly than Trump.) He said Ukraine “may be Russian someday” and blamed Ukraine for starting the war. The U.S. even joined Russia, North Korea, and a tiny bloc of Russian allies to vote against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The less damning explanations for Trump’s pattern of pro-Russia positions have all collapsed in the face of evidence. One line of defense, hauled out by Republican hawks to explain away Trump’s consistent efforts to undermine NATO, is that Trump actually wants to prod Europe into spending more on its own defense. Like a tough football coach, he is merely berating his team to become the best version of itself.

Except when European countries declared themselves ready to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, the level Trump claimed to have wanted, he upped the demand to 5 percent. More recently, he advocated for the election of the right-wing, pro-Russian, anti-NATO AfD party in Germany. That is a strange thing to do if your goal is to push allies to stand up for themselves against Russia, but a perfectly sensible position if your goal is to undermine the anti-Russia alliance.

Republican Russia-hawks hoped they could bring Trump around by getting Ukraine to sign a deal handing over a portion of its mineral wealth to the United States. Instead, Trump announced that the mineral deal was dead. This, too, would be a strange move if his motives were purely transactional, but a very understandable one if his motives were to abandon Ukraine to Putin’s tender mercies.

Even today, Trump’s bullying commenced well before Zelensky had opened his mouth. Trump greeted his counterpart on the White House driveway with condescending mockery, pointing at him and telling onlookers, “He’s all dressed up today,” like Bill Batts in Goodfellas belittling Joe Pesci’s character. (“Hey, Tommy, all dressed up!”) Zelensky’s attire—the Ukrainian president wears military attire, not a suit, to remind the world that his country is at war—has been a fixation on the right, and conservatives have seized upon it as a pretext to blame him for Trump’s anger. Oddly, they did not seem to mind that Elon Musk showed up at the White House this week in a T-shirt and baseball cap.

Might Zelensky have gotten a different outcome by taking Trump’s abuse and stream of lies with more self-abasement? Sure, it’s possible; if you reason backwards from a bad outcome, any different strategy is almost axiomatically smarter. Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind.

One of the stranger moments among many in yesterday’s White House presser turned grudge match with Volodymyr Zelensky was a query about the Ukrainian president’s outfit. He was in town to sign a deal that would give the United States a big stake in his country’s rare-earth minerals and, hopefully, some newfound motivation to help fend off Russia’s aggression. He opted for all black, a sleek, collarless shirt and pants that was more elegant than his usual fatigues (President Donald Trump remarked that he was “all dressed up today” when he first greeted him), but he still stood out for not being in a suit and tie. This prompted a cheeky question from Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the pro-Trump outlet Real America’s Voice. “Why don’t you wear a suit?” Glenn asked Zelensky. “You’re in the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit. Do you own a suit!?”

Inane though the question might have been, it pointed to a stylistic gulf that separates Trump and Zelensky, and that may have contributed to the eventual blowup over whether Ukraine can still count the United States an ally in fighting off Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Both presidents are showmen (and former television entertainers) who have carefully crafted their public images, but they are as different in style as Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini: steely versus bombastic, slyly cutting versus openly mocking, understated and dry versus blunt and derisive.  

To Glenn’s leading question, Zelensky responded with what to my ears was a humor as dark as Ukrainian black bread. “I will wear a costume after this war will finish,” Zelensky said. “Maybe something like yours. Maybe something better, I don’t know. We will see. Maybe something cheaper.”

Over the past three years, Zelensky has fashioned for himself a leader-in-wartime look, with his scruffy facial hair and a gravelly voice. He speaks in matter-of-fact ways, referring to Putin early in the meeting as a “killer and terrorist.” An actor before he became president, Zelensky has so much embodied this role that it seemed nearly impossible for him to abandon his practiced fortitude as Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, presented an alternate reality in which Zelensky and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, were just two men who refused to get along.

[Read: How Zelensky gave the Jewish world a hero]

Unlike French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who appeared next to Trump last week and kept quiet and patient while the American president bloviated, Zelensky, equally invested in his own persona, found this impossible. He took his turn to answer questions Trump had already fielded. He raised his eyebrows or swiveled his head at particularly outlandish assertions, playing subtly to the cameras. When Trump gave a both-sides account of battlefield losses, he interjected, quietly but clearly, “They came to OUR country.” Admirable as his truth-telling may have been, it also set off Trump and his vice president in ways that may not have been strategic.

The more they berated him for not being grateful enough, for not appreciating that he was supposed to play the supplicant, the more Zelensky snapped into the mode he has perfected. “You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump told him. “I’m not playing cards,” Zelensky shot back, eyes narrowed in skepticism.

Americans are very familiar with Trump’s exaggerated self-presentation: the carnival barker who leaps to superlatives. It wasn’t enough for him to describe Ukrainian cities as damaged by Russia. He had to say that many of them were “not recognizable, there’s not a building standing.” This is a rhetorical style as native to Trump as the long red tie dangling past his belt. He has no patience for shades of gray. Putin is a man he knows. Putin is a man who was treated badly like he was. Therefore, the president concludes, he can be trusted. If Trump says Putin will abide by a cease-fire, he will abide by a cease-fire. End of story.

Zelensky’s persona is, in its way, more carefully constructed—honed over time. In the early days of the invasion, in the videos he made of himself in which he insisted he would never leave Ukraine, he appeared giddy, the comedian he once was still visible in a slight smirk. But he was already learning how to transform his stocky 5-foot-7-inches frame into an embodiment of resolve, an important metonym for a relatively small but surprisingly tenacious country that nevertheless needs a great deal of outside help. When offered the chance to evacuate in the early days, he was reported to have said, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” like a Ukrainian Dirty Harry. As the war has dragged on, he has mastered that aura of cool and perseverance—jaw thrust forward, chest pushed out, terse and wry in his delivery. Asked once what he would do if Putin ever called him, he deadpanned, “How could he call me? He doesn’t have a mobile. I don’t use the telegraph.”

[Tom Nichols: It was an ambush]

What happened in the White House on Friday was a realignment of American foreign policy—a misfired negotiation or a perverse setup, depending on your perspective. But it was also an explosive chemical reaction catalyzed by the clash of two incompatible elements. To Trump, Zelensky’s stoicism came across as rude. And to Zelensky, Trump’s exaggerations came across as offensive. When Vance jumped in and suggested that maybe Ukraine could try diplomacy, a wire seemed to trip in Zelensky’s brain, and the role he has perfected—of a leader on the side of freedom against a murderous dictator—kicked in. After plainly enumerating the cease-fire agreements Putin has violated, he leaned forward and asked, “What kind of diplomacy, J. D., you are speaking about? What do you mean?” Vance accused him of being “disrespectful,” and the yelling soon started.

When Zelensky began speaking of the way America might one day “feel” the consequences of Putin’s victories, despite the buffer of its “nice ocean,” it was Trump’s turn to feel triggered. He sensed that Zelensky was stealing his show, setting himself up as the truly tough one, on the front line of a war from which Trump is shrinking away. This was not acceptable to the president. “You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” Trump scolded him. Only Trump himself can dictate what we feel. And only Trump can dictate how visitors to the Oval Office make their case. So he reasserted control by taking credit for enabling Zelensky’s straight talk: “The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy,” he said.

It’s possible that Zelensky came into the meeting knowing that it was already too late for him and Ukraine, that Trump was too much on the side of Russia, and that he had little to gain from the obsequiousness that Trump and Vance had scripted for him. Regardless of what was in his best interest, Zelensky just couldn’t let things slide. If he had, he wouldn’t be himself. Trump, too, had to be himself; he couldn’t stay quiet.

The immediate result of this clash was that Zelensky’s trip to Washington appears to have been for naught. The deal on the table, which would give the United States a 50 percent stake in the revenues of Ukraine’s oil, gas, and minerals, was dead. It was designed to keep America invested in Ukraine’s future—at quite a high price—but Trump never seemed all that excited about it. What motivated him instead was what now seems to have been inevitable given these two men’s personalities: the opportunity for a smackdown. In his last words at the press conference, Trump made clear that he, at least, had gotten what he wanted: “This is going to be great television, I’ll tell you that.”

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.