The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created in 1964 to fight entrenched workplace discrimination. Under Trump, it's now trying a bold new strategy: abolish the evidence. The agency is moving to kill its long-standing EEO‑1 data collection — the boring-but-crucial demographic reports that let the government see where women and people of color mysteriously never seem to get hired or promoted. If you don't count the bodies, there was never a crime. Inspirational.

As a bonus, Trump-appointed chair Andrea Lucas is also pushing to scrap a 1979 regulation that gave employers a legally sound roadmap for voluntary affirmative action — mentoring, hiring targets, and other race- and gender-conscious steps that the Supreme Court itself blessed in United Steelworkers v. Weber. For nearly half a century, that guidance told companies how to fix discrimination without breaking the law. The new plan is simpler: pretend Title VII requires total colorblindness while also making sure no one collects the data that proves systemic bias exists.

Lucas has been out on the conference circuit insisting that "the way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race. The end. Full stop." Meanwhile, the agency she runs is busy yanking away both the x‑ray machine (the data) and the treatment plan (the affirmative-action guidance). It's a "more beautiful vision" of the country, sure — as long as you’re the one doing the discriminating and you’d like the federal civil rights cops to show up unarmed and blindfolded.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order to "save" college sports, which is a bit like putting the arsonist in charge of the fire department because he really, really likes watching flames. The order frets that big-time college football might rip itself away from the NCAA money trough and stop subsidizing women’s and Olympic sports, and calls on Congress to act before anyone notices that the real problem is the system that treats unpaid athletes as walking billboards.

The catch: this sudden concern for women’s sports is coming from the same guy whose Education Department made sure NIL money didn’t have to be equitably distributed under Title IX, weakening the very law that built women’s college athletics in the first place. Now Trump wants to "go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court"—which apparently means rolling back athlete compensation while pretending to protect the sports his own policies helped endanger. Women and Olympic athletes might get a side benefit, but the priority is crystal clear: keep the football plantation intact, toss a few reporting requirements on top, and call it reform.

The result is a gloriously incoherent Trump 2.0 college sports agenda: Title IX is undermined, NIL is partially re-stuffed into the toothpaste tube, schools are ordered to count things they were already legally required to count, and everyone prays the courts will rescue the old order from the radical threat of players being paid. If women’s sports survive this, it’ll be as an accidental byproduct of the administration’s real mission—protecting the cash flow of the most powerful programs while blaming "wokeness" when non-revenue teams get cut.

Trump kicked off his Iran war announcing he’d eliminate “imminent threats,” topple the regime, inspire an uprising, destroy Iran’s nuclear program, wipe out its missiles and proxies, and accept nothing short of “unconditional surrender.” Months, thousands of dead, and a wrecked global economy later, he’s now racing to sign a peace memorandum that… might end up looking a whole lot like the 2015 JCPOA he shredded in 2018 so he could feel taller than Obama.

The war’s big strategic achievement? Iran briefly closed the Strait of Hormuz, kneecapped 20% of the world’s oil supply, helped spike U.S. gas and fertilizer prices, and then watched as Trump, self-styled master of dominance, begged his way to a ceasefire mediated by Pakistan and Qatar. Tehran now enjoys more leverage, a reopened strait will operate under a new Iran-favored system, and Iran still sits on enough highly enriched uranium for up to 10 bombs—uranium it only managed to stockpile because Trump tore up the deal that had been keeping it in check.

Hawks like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Roger Wicker, and Mike Pompeo are suddenly horrified that the White House is staggering toward a compromised enrichment deal they spent years denouncing as appeasement when Obama did it. Meanwhile, reporting suggests Iran’s military capabilities were nowhere near as “obliterated” as Trump claimed—something like 70–80% of its missiles and drones are still intact, the regime survived even after Israel killed Ali Khamenei, and his successor is promising Israel’s destruction by 2040. So now the man who promised transformation is being forced into the same transactional diplomacy he mocked, trying to sneak out the back door while Robert Kagan helpfully labels the whole thing what it is: a strategic defeat he hopes Americans are too distracted by gas prices to notice.