Andrew Prokop
Appearances
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
I'm Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, Vox, covering politics.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
I've been thinking about it as I tried to, you know, rise above the day-to-day headlines and focus on the recurring stories, things where big things have happened already that have made a difference. And I think there are really four stories of that nature so far. The first is the economy and tariffs.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
The second, I would say, is immigration, as Trump attempts to impose his mass deportation agenda, as he is making the U.S. a less welcoming place for foreigners generally. All sorts of big, high-profile battles and showdowns, and we're probably just at the beginning of that.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
The third, I would say, is Elon Musk and Doge and this general agenda of kind of dismantling government, cutting government spending.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
firing federal workers. But the fourth, I think, and one in which in some ways is the most ominous, is what I view as Trump's agenda of retribution.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
He has been more willing than any other president in recent memory to use the power of the federal government against people who he views as his political enemies or people who are viewed as being on the left.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
Well, he said different things at different times. There were some moments. I remember one moment when he was on Fox News and the host was basically begging him to say, I'm not going to seek retribution against my political enemies. My question is a very serious one.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
And I think he has chosen pretty much a maximally aggressive course as compared to, you know, all of the possibilities that had been expected as to how far he could go on this.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
Well, he's gone after a lot of people involved with the Biden administration, you know, Biden himself, several of his top officials.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
He's gone after people who are involved in sort of the legal resistance against Trump or were involved in the cases that were about investigating or indicting Trump. But he's also gone after some of his own people or people who used to be some of his people.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
Then there's the case of Mike Pompeo, who was Trump's secretary of state in his first term. He seemed to be in line for another top appointment as recently as perhaps October 2024. But somehow people behind the scenes convinced Trump that Pompeo was somehow against him.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
And then suddenly during the transition and at the beginning of the administration, we see these personal public attacks on Pompeo and then yanking his security details. a top aide associated with Pompeo, Brian Hook, as well. Someone who was on Trump's State Department transition team before suddenly being kind of penalized by Trump's retaliation.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
So he's really sort of used it, you know, against Democrats, against his critics, but also people on his own side who he feels like stepped out of line in some way or demonstrated insufficient loyalty.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
oh, this is extremely unusual. It's unprecedented as far as I know. It's extremely petty. The justification that they give is, oh, this is expensive and we don't want to fund it. But I mean, that's just silly. It's a rounding error in expense. It's just like a personal form of payback that's like, hey, if you step one toe out of line, I'm not going to make sure that
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
a hostile foreign power doesn't assassinate you. I'm going to, you know, leave you open to that possibility. I'm not doing anything for you.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
Elite universities were kind of in right wing thinking, were basically deemed of certain of Trump's top donors, the center of wokeness. Like they were what unleashed wokeness on society. Right wing activists like Christopher Ruffo want to really kind of smash the universities.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
But of course, the public universities under left-wing bureaucratic rule are hostile to open inquiry, hostile to civic debate. To really go after, as we've seen Harvard and this belief that the universities are the power centers of the left. And if you can...
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
take away their research funding, if you can threaten their tax-exempt status, if you can threaten all kinds of other consequences, you will force them to behave in ways that are more accommodating to the right.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
So this is more related to kind of the prosecutions and investigations of Donald Trump, which often involved certain people who either used to be or are at these law firms. And so I think he has some resentment about that. And then there's also, again, there's this right-wing agenda, activist agenda as well, where they argue that, oh, these big law firms are kind of
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
in their own way, centers of progressive activism as well in what's known as the pro bono work that they offer to do for various causes. So, you know, you have this Trump effort to kind of punish these big law firms. And as we saw in universities as well, of kind of deals or agreements in which they say, oh, OK, we will do these things differently.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
We will pledge this amount of pro bono work or money to these causes that Trump likes and so on.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
The president can do a lot of things that with his authority that he perhaps due to older notions of decorum or fairness or ethics that seem out of date in this administration that he would not have previously done. But they're also just doing a lot of stuff that seems completely illegal. And so why not both?
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
They're they're pursuing both and they're going to see what sticks because they fundamentally view politics and the purpose of government as about punishing their enemies. And which in this case, they've defined so broadly as to define like as to encompass all sorts of liberal or left leaning institutions, as well as the specific people and issues.
Today, Explained
100 days of payback
groups that had that ever run afoul of Donald Trump personally.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
USAID, run by radical lunatics, and we're getting them out, and then we'll make a decision.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as impoundment.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
In that process, we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
Well, I'm appalled by all of this stuff because it's damaging the foreign... affairs apparatus of the US government and this just beginning, they're going after the CIA, the FBI. We have people all over the world that are very sympathetic because they know the American system because they used to work for us in high positions of power.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
The training ground for the developing world were our scholarship programs and the foreign service nationals who worked on the staff. All of that is being wiped out now. The Chinese, by the way, during the Cold War, we used to give 20,000 scholarships a year to people who get their master's degree and PhDs in the US.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
A lot of countries like South Korea and Taiwan, those PhDs ran the country for 30 years. And they're all very pro-American. There's a reason for it, because they went to the United States to get their education. That was 20,000. They've cut the budget back, and now it's getting wiped out. Guess who does 40,000 scholarships a year? The Chinese government does to promising students.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
So the Chinese now are taking over the world order, and there's no way of countering it because they're shutting down the agency that works on this.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
We are 40, the international humanitarian response system and famine, civil wars, and natural disasters like earthquakes, 40% of it is USAID. And our response capacity is enormous. That's all collapsed completely. We used to send out DART teams. Whenever there's an emergency, DART team is Disaster Assistance Response Team. We can send them out in 48 hours. All gone.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
All the infrastructure is gone. Now, some people are saying, oh, no, the State Department said they're merging all this in state. You cannot train someone in two months to do this stuff. Half the UN system will shut down in the emergency because we are the funders of it.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
So what's going to happen now is refugee camps and IDP, internally displaced camps, are already depopulating because there's no food, there's no services left. People are going to starve to death if they just sit there. And I'll tell you what's going to happen. There's going to be mass movements of population toward Europe and toward the United States.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
They think they have a problem with border security now. They haven't seen anything yet. There is a mess at the border. There is absolutely no question. We need to deal with that. Fentanyl is coming across. That's a real issue. But you know, we cannot stop the movement into the United States without dealing with the rest of the world. It can't be done.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
And if you leave the rest of the world and think we can build a wall around the United States that's going to protect us from this chaos, you're living in a fantasy world.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
Absolutely, indisputably, they are going to die. And it's not going to be a small number. Now, usually in a famine, I've been to famines in the Somali famine, which was horrendous in 1991-92. I watched children die right in front of me. So it is seared into my mind. I was in Rwanda just after the Rwandan genocide. The Americans, we've been a little insulated from this. We've never had a famine.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
in the United States. I mean, people said, oh, some of the pilgrims died of starvation in 1620 during that winter. That's not a famine. Famines are when thousands of people die in a certain geographic area, and it takes two or three years to stop it. Now, one of the things that's disturbing me, which shows what the, either ignorance or they're doing it deliberately.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
I don't know, and I don't wanna judge. I think it's ignorance. The famine early warning system is the driver of a lot of what we do in the emergency area of food security. What is it? It is a predictive model. We take aerial photographs every day from satellites. All over the world, in the food insecure areas, we compare the color on the ground from one year to the next.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
So in the first week of June, if the ground is green one year and brown the next, we assume there's been a crop failure. That is not sufficient to tell what's happening on the ground. So we send teams in. There's a vast network of people who work with AID that actually don't work for us. They work with us.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
These are local people and they're economists, they're food experts, and they go in and find out what's going on the ground. That system, now they shut down. Well, basically it's like driving a car with no steering wheel. The fuse system is the steering wheel. So you have a car full of food, it can't get where it's going because there's no steering wheel. And I've raised this repeatedly.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
Both parties support AID. But now with the president and the base, the base has changed. I'm from a working class family, so I'm not criticizing working people. My grandparents were poor mill workers, $9 a week. My grandfather was illiterate in Greek and in English. We did well. We did well over time. So these people are not into this. We've lost the upper middle class.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
The business community is not Republican anymore. And so the base of the party is not really into what's going on in the world. So they thought they could do this with no political consequences. They're making bizarre stuff up. They had to think that $50 million has been spent on condoms in Gaza. Well, number one, no money has been sent on condoms in Gaza.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
Two, the president said it was $100 million. Nick Kristof said, well, we did the calculation, $100 million would buy 3 billion condoms for 1 million Palestinian men, which is obviously utterly ridiculous. You worked hard.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
It's low hanging fruit and the people who are going to be affected are in the developing world and they don't vote. They're poor people and they don't vote. And so it's easy to dismiss them. And they wanted to make an example of us. They wanted to make an example so they can go out now and go after other federal departments and agencies.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
Instead of dealing with the entitlement program, they're going after the infrastructure of the federal government. I think we're over-regulated in terms of regulations, all agencies and departments. But there's a thoughtful way of doing that. A giant sledgehammer to smash the government, you do incremental changes.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
You don't do with a sledgehammer and retire 10,000 people and shut down agencies and programs. The first thoughtful thing any administrator does, left or right, is what are the unintended consequences of any action we take? I always did that in any program. They are not only doing that, they don't care. And that's the thing that's extremely dangerous here.
Today, Explained
DOGE-y behavior
We were paying them tremendous amounts of money and we're not paying them anymore because they haven't done a thing for us.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
For more than half a century, the U.S. had a rule that said anyone that does business with the federal government, from Boeing to FedEx and Pfizer to Johns Hopkins, had to take affirmative action toward hiring people regardless of race, color or creed. On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump ended that rule.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
By the summer of 2023, you had built a broad audience in both mainstream media and also on Twitter and Substack. What was the thrust of your main argument?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
When did it become clear to you that this argument that you were making was resonating?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
What was the goal of ending 11246? What did you want to happen?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Richard, was corporate America actually complaining? Because it seems like if you run a big American corporation, I don't know, I would look at the idea of diversity and I would say, oh, this is a good thing because I want to sell things to American people. And therefore, having people within the company at a very high level who understand how to sell things to American people is a great thing.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
I'm Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, Vox, covering politics.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Good if they come from all kinds of backgrounds. Like, I just wonder, whose part were you taking here?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So the day President Trump puts an end to DEI, the day he puts an end to the executive order, what was your reaction?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
You recently wrote for Vox that the Trump administration is making policy, making policy decisions based on ideas that took hold on Twitter. Say more about what you mean.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
The Trump administration did what you wanted. It eliminated DEI. And then it put Pete Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon and Kash Patel in charge of the FBI and Dan Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI. These gentlemen are not merit picks. And these are obvious examples. But this is why Americans... who are skeptical of your argument will say, look, you're never really going to get merit.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
If we eliminate DEI, we're going to go back to, you know, the president picks a guy who he thinks looks handsome on TV. Do you put any stock in that argument?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
You've clearly become disenchanted with MAGA. You wrote a piece this week that's making the rounds. It's called Liberals Only Censor Musk Seeks to Lobotomize. What happened, Richard?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So one thing that's become very clear in the new Trump administration that is different from the first one is that the people calling the shots are are very, very online. That includes, of course, Elon Musk. It includes Vice President J.D. Vance. It includes Stephen Miller.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
How do you feel about this movement that you are a part of descending into what we have today?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Richard Hanania. The book is The Origins of Woke. He's also on Substack and he is still on Twitter. Dropping in our feed on Sunday, some of you called to ask whether DEI was ever anything more than performance. Our new weekend show is going to give you some answers. Miles Bryan produced today's episode with an assist from Carla Javier. Amina El-Sadi is our editor.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
It includes a whole host of officials whose names we don't even know, but whose onlineness is evident in the policies that are being rolled out by this administration.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
There are all sorts of things, really kind of too many to name. A kind of silly one that just recently happened is that Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she was going to unveil the Epstein files.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
This is something that had spread among the kind of conspiratorial online right that the government was sitting on all these files that will prove that Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker who died in 2019, had blackmail material on prominent Democrats and celebrities. And she ended up trying to make a big splash out of this and handing material on Epstein to online right influencers.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
And it turned out there was absolutely nothing new in those documents, and it ended up being a total embarrassment.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
But there's also many more serious policies and issues that reflect this influence. I'd say that one through line uniting a lot of what the new Trump administration has done is this unified effort to kind of attack what they see as the power centers of progressivism in an effort to roll back wokeness and what they see as progressive cultural dominance.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So you see that in things like funding cutoffs to universities. universities' limits on their research dollars. And you see it in policies aimed at threatening investigations of nonprofits and corporations and colleges that use affirmative action or DEI policies that the administration doesn't like. It's basically a whole set of different issues.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
These are folks who use the word woke and don't define it, which makes it tricky to pin down what they're attacking exactly. But you just ran through a list of things, including universities, including certain sectors of the government. And the attack aimed at these places is what exactly? These guys say... You're doing what wrong?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So I view the online right as essentially an alliance of posters with varying different interests and policy priorities. But they were kind of united in what they saw as combat against the woke. This shared resentment of what these online right people saw as progressive cultural dominance. In Trump's first term, the online right was kind of disreputable. They were viewed as sort of weirdos.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
They weren't in the halls of power in the Republican Party. But there was a real shift that happened after Trump lost the 2020 election and under the Biden administration. When more people who had... You know, some misgivings, some qualms about progressive cultural issues, about the Great Awokening, felt freed up to focus on that more and became more open about being resentful about this.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
As the U.S. exploded following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, a loose coalition of highly online commentators, sub-stackers, and Twitter shitposters set their sights on eviscerating DEI policies. Then they won. Coming up on Today Explained, one of them speaks.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
This includes Elon Musk. He stayed out of politics for the most part in Trump's first term. But under Biden, he became increasingly radicalized and vocal online about wanting to stop what he called the— The worldwide virus. And lots of other prominent figures in Silicon Valley were also part of this trend. Even J.D.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Vance, he was kind of politically neutral in 2020 and fell more and more into this online world in the 2020s.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Broadly, what are these beliefs of theirs that they're trying to protect or that they feel are under attack?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Well, you know, it's different for different people. But, you know, there's a segment of the online right that is kind of just open racists. They want to stand up for white predominance in America. This is sort of, you know, the alt-right. They're very willing to say racist, offensive, politically incorrect things. This kind of blurs over to other people who
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
say such things, but then they argue that they're just saying them ironically. This is kind of something that we saw in the new administration related to a young engineer on Elon Musk's team, Marco Elez. It turned out that just a few months before joining Doge, this guy had made various racist posts online under a pseudonym, including... I was racist before it was cool and normalize Indian hate.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
You know, in the old Trump administration, that would probably have gotten him fired. And it did eventually at first in the new Trump administration. But then he became a kind of cause celebre among the online right. J.D.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
The idea that people who make racist posts online are on your team, that's part of the online right culture. They want to be allowed to say offensive, racist things. They think that woke censoriousness and groupthink went so far. You used to be able to say all kinds of things and now you can't anymore. You got to watch what you say. You might get canceled. And who are the people that are...
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
imposing this oppressive censorship. It's the media. It's progressives. They are the enemy. They are the enemy. And as you can see in what Vance said, you know, siding with the media is worse than trying to fire a racist from your government.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
You write that these ideas have led to policies, actual policy that governs how you and me and every other American lives our lives. What policies would you point to here, Andrew?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
I think probably one of the clearest examples of this influence of the online right was an executive order that Trump released in his first week which was anti-DEI and anti-affirmative action.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
And the specifics of this order are noteworthy because it rolled back an executive order from all the way back in 1965 issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson that has stood since then, that what it essentially did was it required that federal contractors make efforts to employ more women and people of color, that they practice affirmative action. And
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
You know, every previous Republican president has let this stand. But in recent years, as the online right has been exploring various theories about wokeness, about how they could fight back against it, one of their theories was about this specific executive order on affirmative action. They said this needs to be reversed.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
That has been the obsession of one particular writer on the online right for several years now. He's been hammering this drum again and again. His name is Richard Hanania. He argued that the roots of wokeness were in federal civil rights law and specifically in this affirmative action executive order and that –
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Instead of just rolling it back, it should be replaced with a new government policy saying that basically you can't have an affirmative action program. That such programs were illegal because they discriminated based on race, that they violated the Civil Rights Act. So, you know, when that executive order came out from Trump, I immediately thought this
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
These are people who have been reading the Richard Hananias, the online right posters who have had their own obsessions and who have been driving these ideas. And the people in power are really listening to them and trying to impose their ideas to reshape this country.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
That was Vox's Andrew Prokop. Coming up next. But it sounds like based on what you're saying that you are able to take credit for killing DEI. Is that how you see it?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Richard Hanania is a substacker and author of the book The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. All right, so Richard, in the summer of 2023, you were a public intellectual. You'd been writing op-eds for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
And then that August, The Huffington Post reported that years earlier, you'd written racist, misogynist posts on right-wing websites. I'm going to read a couple of those here. For the white gene pool to be created, millions had to die. Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or a piece of art. It's shameful.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Hispanic people don't have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation. You said Muslims can't assimilate because of genetic and IQ differences between them and native Europeans. And you suggested that people with low IQs might be sterilized. Were those sincere beliefs that you held?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
In November of 2023, so this is after the Huffington Post exposed you, you tweeted, people complain about Jews running America. Do they actually believe it should be run by the voters of Baltimore or Appalachia? Doesn't seem that anti-Semites have thought this through. So that was years after, you know, that's years after you were young.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
It's after the Huffington Post has drawn attention to the really disgusting stuff that you tweeted.
Today, Explained
No love (on the spectrum) for RFK Jr.
A decades-old study that said vaccines cause autism is now being called an elaborate fraud.