Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA
Even after the attempted assassination of their presidential candidate, the GOP remains focused on being shitty: During a House Oversight Committee hearing Monday, several GOP representatives blamed Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on the Secret Service hiring women.
In that hearing, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raked Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over the coals for the agency’s failure to prevent 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks from shooting the GOP presidential candidate with an AR-15 rifle. While most remained focused on the agency’s alleged procedural failings, or our nation’s epidemic of gun violence, a few representatives took a more misogynistic approach.
“You are a DEI horror story,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “My wife and I have told my daughter multiple times about how she is going to succeed. She will succeed in life by achieving. Ma’am, you have not achieved today. You’ve let the American public down, and if it were up to me, you’d be gone.”
He wasn’t the only one expressing these thoughts. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) asked Cheatle if she thought there were “too many men” in the Secret Service—and whether she wasn’t hiring men to “meet certain targets.”
The remarks did not go unchecked by their Democratic colleagues: Both Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) called those legislators out during the meeting.
“Some Republicans have used this moment to attack progress towards racial justice and gender equity in America. Disappointing, but not surprising,” said Pressley, adding, “In the wake of gun violence and tragic loss of life, Republicans are ignoring solutions like gun safety reform and are instead trotting out sexist tropes.”
Sexist sentiments were not contained to today’s hearing. Conservative media outlets and far-right influencers were quick to blame female Secret Service agents for the attempt on the president’s life.
A few days following Trump’s attack, the Daily Wire‘s Matt Walsh posted a video of female agents surrounding Trump with the caption:
“There should not be any women in the Secret Service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.”
YouTuber Pearl Davis, often described as the “female Andrew Tate,” tweeted, “Why do we keep trying to put women in positions where we don’t belong? Go work in human resources, assistant, sales, or low-level management.”
It’s easy to write off conservatives’ obsession with “DEI” as pathetic (which it is). But as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, it absolutely should be taken seriously. Removing DEI programs from institutions like universities and workplaces is a large part of Project 2025, the 920-page plan to introduce a Trump-led autocracy to the US; stigmatizing DEI and its advocates is an element of that process. Dias reports:
The group suggests the next conservative presidential administration “must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for culture warriors” and proposes removing terms such as gender equality, DEI, abortion, and reproductive rights from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
It also calls for: amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to prevent the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from collecting data on race and ethnicity; doing away with disparate impact legal theory; limiting the applications of the Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that established Title VII protections for employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and rescinding regulations that bar discrimination based on “sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
With President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, and Kamala Harris, a Black woman, the frontrunner to become his replacement, we’re already seeing an uptick in “DEI” being leveled as an insult, especially towards Harris herself.
On Sunday, Grothman, the Wisconsin Republican, told CBS that Democrats are only endorsing the vice president as the Democratic nominee because of “her ethnic background.” Judging by today’s congressional hearing, if Harris clinches the candidacy, those racist and sexist attacks are surely going to escalate.
