An open letter to Donald Trump about DEI

From inclusive leadership to moral blindness – a new era of corporate anti-responsibility.

An open letter to Donald Trump: leadership must be inclusive, not immoral  

Dear Donald Trump and friends, 

Life, as you know, is often full of complexity, paradoxes, and contradictions. Recent news alone has demonstrated such. While some of your friends, who are part of the global elite, flew into Davos earlier this year to over-intellectualise the current state of global affairs under this year’s theme of ‘collaboration in the intelligent age’, you took the opportunity at your inauguration to punch down on some of society’s most vulnerable communities. You Mr Trump, as 47th President of the most powerful nation of Earth, represent the biggest threat to social and corporate inclusion since 1939.  

In a 2024 article (The art of 21st-century leadership: From succession planning to building a leadership factory), McKinsey and Co highlighted six key principles of 21st century leadership. McKinsey discussed the importance of positive energy and personal balance, servant and selfless leaders, a humble minds, levity and stewardship amongst other attributes.

Our research on inclusive leadership at FAIRER Consulting supports the importance of humbleness, curiosity, empathy and stewardship. It explains how the adoption of the principles of inclusive leadership, through a servant-based approach, means leaders of global and national organisations can build trust and innovation. In turn, this can drive inclusivity, psychological safety and business performance.  

You, Mr Trump, are an anti-leader. You stand for the exact opposite of an inclusive leader. You push aside the principles of openness, fairness, integrity, honesty, joy, and curiosity for things outside your experience, and instead embrace hate, prejudice, and discrimination.  

On the day of your inauguration, with the stroke of a pen, you took a strike at the heart of intellectual curiosity, openness, empathy, and inclusive leadership. Your declaration that the US will only recognise ‘two sexes – male and female’, is a clear attack on the US trans community.  A further executive order declared that all DE&I offices, positions and programmes within government departments be terminated with 60 days.  

In classic anti-leader style, by calling DE&I programmes ‘illegal’, which they are not, and suggesting you want to ‘forge a society that is colour-blind and merit-based’, you have adopted doublespeak as your go-to style. These statements, within a post-George Floyd landscape, seek to ignore current racial injustices and biases within the US, and replace a drive toward equal outcomes with a colour-blind approach.   

You are not alone 

While many of the headlines have, for obvious reasons, focused on you as an individual, the credit given to you is overstated. We must also put a spotlight on the collective new-right masculine energy. In a 2025 interview with Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg suggested that the corporate world needed more masculine energy and that corporate cultures that celebrate aggression should be encouraged – this is driving your politics of hate and division.

To some extent, we should have seen it coming. This push for more masculine energy and DE&I backlash has its roots in the anti-DE&I memo of the former Google engineer James Damore, who accused the tech company of operating within a gender-based, ‘ideological eco-chamber’. 

You are the figurehead of a wider cultural movement of anti-leaders that seek to radically destabilise the principles of a fair and equal society. I see your supporters; they include the global business elite – Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tilman Fertitta, the owner of Houston Rockets, Stephen Feinberg, co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, and Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. This list of white male billionaires goes on. But I also understand that your alliance includes women and people of colour.  

The ripple effect of your collective movement is moral disengagement, whereby you and your associates favour an in-group psychology, while alienating and attacking others. Let’s be clear, you and your band of Trumpian brothers and sisters have identified DE&I as your number one target. It’s a target that you need to shore up your own identity, as without targeting the most vulnerable, you have little to contribute to the world. You are engaging in classic hate politics.

On Allport’s scale of prejudice, the hate speech directed at the  LGBTQ+ community and migrants is at level 3. Examples where level 3 has been recorded include apartheid in South Africa and the Nuremberg Laws of 1930s Germany. Hate speech can lead to actual physical attack (level 4) and murder (level 5). According to the US Human Rights Campaign at least 23 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been murdered in the US since November 2024.  

The inclusive leaders 

Some corporate leaders’ decisions to roll back or dismantle previous DE&I efforts, reflects their own in-group mentality or a lack of moral courage. Leaders of companies that have recently announced a reduction or cancellation of their DE&I efforts – Meta, Target, Costco, Amazon, and McDonalds to name a few – are engaging in a mix of what psychologists call selective empathy and outright moral blindness. These actions demonstrate that their previous efforts were either performative efforts or moral disengagement.  

Not everyone shares your views on DE&I, Mr Trump. Indeed, the reality behind your headlines is hope for a fairer and more equitable society that you may want. A number of CEOs who attended Davos re-affirmed their commitment to DE&I. These include JP Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who stated that his company will, “Continue to reach out to the Black community and Hispanic community, LGBT community, and the veteran community.”  

Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman said attitudes toward diversity “come and go with different political cycles” and her company will continue to value “diversity of views and diversity of backgrounds.” Other CEOs stating their commitment to DE&I include, Vista Equity Partners and Bank of America.

Additionally, Apple, Microsoft, and Delta Airlines have recently either rejected investor calls to roll back on DE&I or have re-affirmed their commitments. These inclusive leaders understand the strategic value that DE&I brings to business. While the latest conversation around DE&I may be welcome for some, for those who understand its value, nothing will diminish its importance. 

While you, Mr Trump, are asking US companies to play pick-a-side like kids in a culture wars playground, we as employees, as human beings, suffer the consequences. Many groups now live their daily lives on guard for fear of being continuously othered by hostile social, political and corporate cultures.  

Adopting the FAIRER Consulting framework  

We will continue to support organisations to invest in: 

• Inclusive leadership: This means rejecting self-serving leadership, by embracing self-reflection, curiosity and perspective-taking. Perspective-taking is perhaps one of hardest responses for us as leaders and DE&I advocates at this current time. How can we, at a time of a full-scale attack, be expected to “see the world from the perspective of others?” as Adam Galinsky, author of Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both, defines perspective-taking. But as suggested by Galinsky, perspective-taking is a critical leadership skill needed to manage both our friends and our foes.  

• Allyship and advocacy: This means rejecting bystander behaviour and actively working towards the rejection of bias and hate, while simultaneously dialling up our efforts on inclusion,  belonging and psychological safety. It requires empathetic engagement and an active challenge of what Poornima Luthra, associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School, calls ‘termite biases’. Allyship and advocacy also involve using one’s own power to push forward opportunities for others, through fairer and inclusive hiring, developing and promotion opportunities. 

• Calm reflection and role-modelling our values: The anti-leaders of the new right in the US are looking for a fight. They want us, need us, to be angry. Calm reflection, which I know at present is hard, requires us to pause, taking a moment to think before we act. Remembering what we stand for and remembering our ‘why’ of DE&I will prevent us from drifting with the times. Curiosity and openness of mind for a vision for a fairer world, supported by meaningful actions are timeless leadership qualities.  

So, yes this is a letter to Mr. Trump and his followers, but it is also a letter to myself and my DE&I friends. We know who we are, and what we stand for. And together, collectively through what the late feminist thinker Bell Hooks, called Alliance Politics, we’ve got this.  

Yours sincerely, 

Dan Robertson 

MD, FAIRER Consulting