Explained | Why Musk and Vance went to bat for a self-described racist

By Michelle Goldberg

If you want to understand the nature of our new regime, compare the fates of two federal employees who recently found themselves at least temporarily unable to keep doing their jobs. One is a West Point graduate, Army veteran and former prosecutor who was asked by political appointees in the first Trump administration to join a diversity committee. The other is a 25-year-old self-described racist. You can probably guess which of them Vice President J D Vance intervened to help out.

The West Point grad, who doesn't want his name used because he's still hoping to return to his duties, was a regional director at the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education. Based in a red state, he investigated abuses in the education system including racial discrimination, sexual harassment and the failure to accommodate disabilities. His last three performance reviews were impeccable, according to documents shared with me. He saw himself as an apolitical civil servant, and told me that even before Donald Trump's inauguration last month, he was thinking about how to align his office's priorities with those of the incoming administration. So he was blindsided when, on Jan. 31, he was placed on indefinite administrative leave, along with dozens of other Department of Education employees.

He and a few of those colleagues are now being represented by civil rights attorney Subodh Chandra. Most of those put on leave from the Office of Civil Rights, said Chandra, served on a diversity committee, though some simply took diversity training. It doesn't matter that Kenneth Marcus, an assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the first Trump term, created the committee that the regional director served on. It doesn't matter that in a letter to employees, another Trump official at the time, Kimberly M. Richey, called its work "critically important." It doesn't even matter that, following a promotion, the regional director said he had less and less time for the committee, and attended only one or two meetings in the last year and a half. In the new administration, any connection to anti-discrimination efforts is considered suspect.

It's useful to compare this administration's treatment of the regional director to its handling of Marko Elez, a member of Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency who, until recently, had access to a highly sensitive payments system at the Department of the Treasury. Elez resigned last week, after The Wall Street Journal uncovered racist social media posts he'd made just months ago, which included, "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," and "Normalise Indian hate." Reinstating him, however, quickly became a cause embraced by the world's most powerful men.

On the social platform X, Musk polled his followers on whether Elez should get his job back; not surprisingly, most voted yes. Vance also weighed in, writing, "I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life. We shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back." Trump agreed. And so, according to Musk, Elez will be returning to government.

It is clearly absurd for Vance to insist that Elez is at once a "kid" who should be forgiven for things he wrote last year and a man who deserves a major role restructuring the federal government. But his argument isn't supposed to make sense; Vance is asserting his freedom from the need to justify the administration's actions according to preexisting standards. Under the new standards, diversity is taboo, and racism is not. This stark reversal of values is a signature of the Trump restoration.

Elez, after all, is not the only member of Musk's coterie who dabbles in far-right trolling. As Reuters reported, in just the last few months Gavin Kliger, a young engineer who helped shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, has boosted social media posts by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rabidly misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.

Nor is bigotry a bar to high-level jobs elsewhere in the administration. Darren Beattie had to leave a job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration for speaking at a conference that included white nationalists. Four months ago, he wrote on X, "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work." He's now been appointed acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, one of the State Department's top jobs, sending a worldwide message about who represents Trump's America.

The Trumpist right believes that the social justice causes of the last decade or so, including #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the transgender rights movements, constituted a Maoist-style cultural revolution. The goal of Musk, Vance and their allies, evidently, is a counterrevolution as sweeping, cruel and arbitrary as the one they imagine they've suffered. Last year Vance, in an interview with my colleague Ross Douthat, said of liberals, "These guys have all read Carl Schmitt -- there's no law, there's just power." The suggestion that Democrats were taking cues from that infamous Nazi jurist was pure projection -- a sign, in retrospect, of how Vance himself would behave in office.

According to the rules of the old system, Chandra's client, the regional director, did everything right. But as the Trump administration shows us every day, those rules don't apply anymore.