On Wednesday’s CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish and her panel managed to recast enforcement of federal civil rights law under Donald Trump as “enforcing ideology,” while a Democratic consultant insisted that DEI “was never a problem” until Trump took office.
The segment opened with archival footage of Jesse Jackson defending boycotts, including the recent effort to intimidate Target after the retailer scaled back "diversity, equity, and inclusion" initiatives following Trump’s reelection. Cornish noted that Target’s CEO has acknowledged financial effects from the leftist boycott.
The more revealing moment came later, during discussion of Trump’s State of the Union vow to end DEI policies across the federal government and, indirectly, the private sector.
On "CNN This Morning," anchor Audie Cornish claimed under Trump, "the actual government now is involved in enforcing a different ideology" on race. Democrat Antjuan Seawright lamented “DEI was never a problem until Trump became President of the United States.” pic.twitter.com/w7c8O0f0YJ
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) February 18, 2026
After airing remarks from current Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas defending equal protection principles, Cornish framed the issue this way:
“What it means is the actual government now is involved in enforcing a different ideology, so to speak.”
No. It means the federal government is enforcing the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. For decades, debates over affirmative action and race-conscious hiring have centered on whether certain DEI-style practices cross that legal line. That argument did not begin in 2016 — much less in 2025. Some would start with the Supreme Court ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978.
Yet Democratic consultant Antjuan Seawright went further, claiming:
“DEI was never a problem until Trump became President of the United States.”
Really? California voters banned affirmative action at public institutions in 1996. And just last year — during Joe Biden’s presidency — the Court ruled against race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
On CNN, however, longstanding constitutional and legal disputes are recast as sudden culture-war inventions.
Seawright also suggested that scaling back DEI resurrects an old injustice, invoking “this idea that black folks should always be on the menu and never at the table.” Opposing DEI makes you a cannibal? The metaphor implies that retreating from race-conscious corporate policies amounts to a return to exclusion.
Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, offered the clearest counterargument: civil rights law was designed to "tear down" racial barriers, not replace one form of racial preference with another.
For CNN, insisting that Americans be judged without regard to race is now the intolerably ideological position.
