Democracy is strongest when it embraces a diversity of identities and perspectives, with citizens united in pursuit of the common good. The early actions of Donald Trump’s second administration suggest that he is intent on dismantling this vision of democracy, seeing it as a threat to his power.

Trump’s first few weeks in office have been a whirlwind of activity: orders, memos, statements, and actions. Most of this has been asserted with unprecedented presidential powers or with unclear implications. The chaos is, in part, a political strategy. He is intentionally “flooding the zone” with wild words and actions to keep his opposition disoriented and overwhelmed. Trump has issued more executive orders more quickly than any previous president. The orders are also extreme. In this maelstrom, it is difficult to distinguish signal from noise, the literal from the serious, or committed policy goals from temporary negotiating positions.

An Assault on Diversity and Democracy

Viewing Trump’s orders and statements through an inclusive democracy lens helps to make sense of the madness. For example, let us consider diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). To me, these are essential American values. We have always been a country marked by religious, racial, and cultural diversity. Our country was founded on the ideal of civic equality to be distinct from a monarchy or aristocracy.

The moral arc of our history has generally bent toward justice. Institutional DEI policies, which were created in response to the civil rights organizing in the 20th and 21st centuries, are examples of America’s capacity to rise above our worst impulses and be guided by the better angels of our nature. Our country promises equal treatment under the law and an equal democratic voice to the descendants of the colonized and the colonizers, the enslaved and the enslavers, the propertyless and the aristocrats. We often fall short of our highest ideals, but even having that goal is a miracle. Those aspirations uphold the country I want to live in, celebrate, and strive for.

Trump represents a different vision of this country. Attacking DEI has been a central theme of his second term in office. On his first day, he issued an executive order terminating DEI staff and policies throughout the federal administrative state. But Trump didn’t stop with the two million employees of the federal executive branch. A week into the administration, the White House budget office declared a “pause” on nearly all federal grants and funding to prevent any support for “DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” The following week, the newly installed Attorney General, Pam Bondi, announced a plan to bring lawsuits against private-sector companies and institutions who engage in “illegal discrimination and preferences, including policies relating to DEI.” And a couple of weeks after that, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights declared that it would withhold funding from any schools that consider race in “all aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”

Trump is claiming presidential powers to ban DEI at every level of government, including state and local, and within both nonprofit and for-profit organizations across the entire country. The attacks are consistent and relentless. No previous president has attempted this level of control for any purpose, but dismantling DEI is so important to Trump that he is claiming unprecedented powers for the White House.

America First, Humanity Last

Another theme of Trump’s 2025 agenda has been nationalist disregard for the interests of noncitizens and isolationist disdain for international cooperation. He has declared that children born in the United States no longer receive birthright citizenship as a constitutional right. He is aggressively pursuing deportations of undocumented immigrants and has removed a longstanding practice that prohibited ICE from making arrests in churches, hospitals, and schools. He has also withdrawn from international agreements including the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement. He has threatened and, to a more limited extent, enacted tariffs against close allies. And he has almost entirely destroyed the US Agency for International Development, the primary federal agency that provides humanitarian aid around the world. Trump’s “America first” agenda requires the rejection of common interests that Americans share with undocumented members of our communities and with the rest of the world.

Many of these actions are illegal or unconstitutional. The president does not possess the powers he has claimed to reinterpret constitutional law or impound congressionally appropriated spending. Courts have blocked some of his most egregious violations, but Congress does not seem inclined to check or balance him. The Supreme Court has not yet issued substantive decisions about Trump’s second term, but they have already given him broad immunity for criminal acts committed while in office.

Democracy Is Not Zero Sum

Although the Republican Party currently controls every branch of the federal government, the GOP’s margin of victory in the 2024 election was slight, and its majorities in Congress are similarly slim. Public reaction to Trump’s anti-DEI and anti-internationalism policies has been mixed at best. Democracy remains the best hope for steering our country back toward the North Star of our highest values.

Trump is bending and breaking the rules of American democracy to replace diversity, equity, and inclusion with homogeneity, bias, and exclusion, and to replace international cooperation with xenophobic isolation. He must do this because the success of his political movement relies on division. He must constantly reinforce his supporters’ view that politics are a zero-sum game. In Trump’s worldview, if other countries succeed, it can only be at America’s expense. He perpetually must portray himself as the heroic swamp drainer, battling against the “deep state” elitists and undeserving others, who are leeching off hard-working Americans.

The alternative to Trump is inclusive democracy—cooperation rather than division, and shared humanity rather than “us” versus “them.” His political movement could not survive if everyone were empowered to participate and if voters were focused on growing the pie instead of enlarging their own slice of it. He knows this, and it scares him. Trump will try to keep us divided—even if he has to risk breaking the Constitution to do so. If Americans overcome their divisions, he will not succeed.

Alex Lovit is a senior program officer and historian at the Kettering Foundation. He is the host and executive producer of the Kettering Foundation podcast The Context.

From Many, We is a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy. Queries may be directed to fmw@kettering.org.