No, Donald Trump Didn’t Do This to DEI

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 16, 2025

 

NBC News is, to use corporate lingo, rationalizing its operations, a project that culminated in the downsizing of about 150 staffers. Among them, The Wrap reports, are “its teams dedicated to covering issues affecting Black, Asian American, Latino, and LGBTQ+ groups.” The media outlet’s verticals devoted to covering and catering to those demographics will not disappear entirely, but a skeleton staff of reporters covering more general-interest beats will populate them with just enough content so they don’t appear obviously cadaverous.

 

The reporter who broke the news, Corbin Bolies, attributed the zombification of NBC News’ identitarian offerings to many factors, including “a broader retreat in media from diversity efforts in light of federal scrutiny.” That’s a convenient excuse for NBC News executives who want to redirect the ire of angry progressives toward the Trump White House, but DEI-adjacent initiatives like these have been failing for years — long before voters restored Donald Trump to the presidency.

 

Identity-focused initiatives started to look like a costly investment that did not yield a sufficient return under Joe Biden, despite his administration’s efforts to encourage their proliferation. Large firms began sloughing off those programs at a rapid clip beginning in 2023. The following year, before Trump took office, big employers like Walmart, Lowe’s, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Ford, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, among others, pared back or eliminated their DEI departments because the reward they derived from mollifying the litigious progressive activist class no longer exceeded the risk of turning off consumers. A similar phenomenon likely motivated Paramount ahead of its purchase of the Free Press and its elevation of Bari Weiss to helm CBS News. Put simply, consumers were no longer patronizing the product, so the product had to change.

 

NBC News is doing identitarian activists no favors by pretending it was Trump wot done it when market forces are to blame for the sudden lack of attention it’s receiving. Amid the moral panics that overtook the country at the end of the last decade, a variety of firms placed big bets on the notion that Americans just could not get enough divisive social commentary that pitted American minorities against the majority. It was a bad bet that didn’t pay out, and now the companies that made it are licking their wounds and cutting their losses. It’s as simple as that.