Revisiting DEI Under Trump: Lessons from the Past

December 19, 2060¹

by Skyler Fusaro

Dear Jack,

The first eleven months of Trump’s second term have been the most outrageous period in American history. I’ll be writing to you over the next year as Trump and Republicans carry out their dismantling of our country. For some years, I’ve written letters of warning. These letters are about how politicians and private groups have moved our country into an autocracy. We in mid-21st century see the lingering effects of Trumpism.

One terrible Executive Order threatened to impose sanctions. These sanctions targeted organizations that received federal funds. The aim was to punish those implementing DEI. In his first week in office, President Trump issued a series of executive orders (EO). These EOs targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. They affected both the public and private sectors. These executive orders are designed to chill and prohibit lawful efforts to advance equal opportunity. They try to spread disinformation. These orders distort federal laws to advance an agenda based on division and hate.

They called it “neutrality” back then. A replacement for the idea of DEI programs. The word sounded so clean. It was a word you serve in a classroom. You utter it on a park bench without fear of offense. But neutrality, in the Trump years, was the costume of amnesia. It appeared with flags and smiling slogans. Beneath those, the same old heart beat. That heart always tried to edit America into something pure and blameless.

I’ve been rereading accounts from that December in 2025. At that time, the administration ordered national parks to empty their shelves of anything “divisive.” The irony still takes my breath away. The Ocmulgee Mounds (see the photo below) were built by the Muscogee (Creek) people more than a millennium before Columbus. They were labeled subversive by the descendants of their dispossessors. Books about slavery were flagged for possible removal. Books on Native nations faced the same scrutiny. Even those about Deb Haaland — the first Native woman to lead the Interior Department — were targeted. The caretakers of those parks were told to choose “neutral” stories, which of course meant white ones.

I recall you telling me about your visits to the Etowah Indian Mounds. They are only a few miles from your home in Marietta. They experienced the same fate as Muscogee. Later, they sought private funding to keep the history of the Mississippian culture.

You could trace the same logic across the landscape. DEI programs were banned in schools and universities. Words like equity or colonialism turned into threats. It was all one campaign — to make the past safe for those who needed innocence more than truth. By 2060, we know what that project cost us. A generation grew up thinking that equality had been achieved because no one was allowed to mention inequality.

Back then, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta felt like a test site for memory. Trump’s people claimed they wanted to celebrate King’s “unity,” not his critique. They ended free admission on MLK Day and Juneteenth. They also removed context from exhibits. Additionally, they simplified his gospel of economic and moral revolt into a sound bite about harmony. That was how they transformed radical love into patriotic obedience. They turned a martyr to justice into a mascot for order.

I remember walking the streets around Auburn Avenue. I thought: this is what happens when a nation decides its wounds are bad for tourism.

The Trump Files — the second edition. This is the book that finally made its way into university archives after the bans were lifted. It tried to warn us. It said the true authoritarian act wasn’t violence but narration: who gets to tell the story. Nedra Rhone’s article from 2025² reads now like an early chapter in that long arc. She was chronicling the rehearsal for the great forgetting. The state tried to turn every site of shared reckoning into a selfie backdrop.

When I visit the restored Ocmulgee National Park today, the Creek elders tell their own story. Their crafts fill the shops. Children hear the word genocide spoken aloud, without apology. That, more than any monument, feels like national renewal — not neutrality, but truth reclaimed.

And yet, I still worry. Because every generation is tempted to rewrite its guilt into grandeur. The struggle, as ever, is not between left and right, but between those who remember and those who repaint.

Yours in the long work of memory,
Skyler Fusaro
Atlanta, 2060

1. Skyler Fusaro is a fictional characters that I created decades ago. Her character enables me to explore the implications of decisions made in the early years if the 21st Century. Especially during the Trump years. The Skyler Fussro letters is a fictional project embedded in The Trump Files. The files are my non-fiction account of the Trump administration Follow this link to more Skyler Fusaro letters. ↩︎
2. Nedra Rhones, Trump’s rules threaten history at state national sites. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, December 18, 2025 ↩︎