President Trump’s early second-term crackdown on “woke” ideology — including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives — has rippled far beyond Washington, prompting companies to roll back such policies; however, critics warn the left’s ideas could soon resurface under a rebranded label.
“DEI is still alive. It’s not dead yet. It’s bleeding, right? We’ve got blood here, but we know it’s vulnerable,” Terry Schilling, the president of conservative nonprofit and advocacy group the American Principles Project, told Fox News Digital in a December Zoom interview. “But they’re still in charge of the admissions offices and colleges. They’re still in charge of HR departments, and they’re still largely a part of Silicon Valley.”
The American Principles Project has tracked recent cultural shifts toward DEI initiatives, which conservatives argue replace merit with race and identity preferences, penalizing some Americans at work and in schools through expanded bureaucracy and ideological pressure. Schilling said that while the “woke” push seen under the Biden era is retreating under the Trump administration, it remains alive and could return.
“DEI is retreating,” Schilling said in the interview. “But I think that it’s important that we recognize that DEI is not disbanding, it’s rebranding.”
Trump moved quickly to dismantle DEI and woke initiatives upon returning to office in January, signing a day-one executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” directing federal agencies to eliminate such programs. He followed with a second order aimed at restoring merit-based opportunity, including changes to federal contracting and compliance rules.
“We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. And our country will be woke no longer,” Trump said from the dais in Congress in March, celebrating his administration’s achievement just a few months into the job.
Schilling said Trump upended DEI upon returning to the Oval Office, with his executive orders serving as death knells heard from corporate boardrooms to public school classrooms.
“Trump winning the election had a lot to do with this,” Schilling said. “You’re seeing all these CEOs of major tech companies and companies abroad coming to the White House, kissing the ring. They know who’s in power and they’re willing to make deals to get their projects over the finish line. And that’s all great. We should use that. We should us that momentum to further cement opposition to DEI.”
Silicon Valley has long been criticized as a tool used to silence conservatives — including when social media platforms suppressed reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election — but top tech CEOs are now signaling a Trump-era pivot as they pursue deals to expand their businesses amid the artificial intelligence boom.
“President Trump’s executive orders did so much to cut back against DEI, banning DEI throughout the entire federal workforce, banning schools from using and tying federal funds to whether or not schools are implementing racist policies like DEI has done a lot to curb it,” Schilling said. “However, these guys are lying in wait.”
Retail giant Target announced it was ending its three-year DEI initiative, while Disney made changes including removing DEI-related language from its annual business reports. Cracker Barrel, after a backlash to a branding overhaul earlier in 2025, scrapped remodel plans, reverted to its old logo, and eliminated DEI programs, Fox Digital previously reported.
“DEI is an employment issue,” Schilling said. “It’s keeping a large amount of Americans who deserve to have good lives and good incomes out of the workforce simply because they have the wrong color of skin.”
Democrats generally support DEI policies to expand opportunity and reduce discrimination in hiring, promotion, and education, particularly for groups they say have faced historic barriers. Left-wing lawmakers — from members of the Congressional Black Caucus to 2025 Democratic candidates like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — have criticized or campaigned against Trump’s rollback of DEI policies. Schilling warned that future elections, including the 2028 presidential race, could reverse Trump’s progress at the federal level.
“They are lying in wait for the next Democrat president like Gavin Newsom, like JB Pritzker. There’s really no doubt that if another Democrat gets into office, they’re not just going to undo everything President Trump did to curb all the racism through DEI programs. They going to ramp it up. They gonna do it even more so than Barack Obama did and Joe Biden did. So we’ve got to continue to fight this,” Schilling said.
The American Principles Project president said permanently ending DEI and woke ideology requires conservatives to keep winning elections and for voters to use boycotts against companies that embrace left-wing policies, arguing DEI is as much an economic issue as a cultural one.
“If we really want to save the future, DEI must be killed, because it’s not just about the culture, it’s just not about racism,” he said. “It’s so much more. It’s the economy, it’s the future of America, it’s our families, it is our children, and so we really need to remain eternally vigilant until it’s obvious that DEI is never coming back.”
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