Late-night hosts mocked Donald Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education and the military’s sloppy DEI purge.
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel lambasted Donald Trump on Thursday for signing an executive order aimed at dismantling the Department of Education. “Trump famously said he loves the poorly educated, and now we will have so many more people to love,” he lamented.
“The idea behind this is to let the states come up with their own educational standards,” he explained. “For instance, from here on, in order to receive a high school diploma in Florida, all you have to do is complete the maze on the back of the kids’ menu at Fuddruckers.
“The sheer tonnage of all the dumb and damaging stuff they’re doing, it’s hard to wrap your head around,” he continued. That included the Department of Defense removing a page about Jackie Robinson’s military career from its website, as part of its “war against woke”.
According to the Pentagon press secretary, John Ullyot, the removal was because “we do not view or highlight them through the prism of immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity or sex”.
“Right, Jackie Robinson was just a baseball player, there’s nothing special about him! And Rosa Parks just loved to ride the bus,” Kimmel retorted.
The Pentagon also took down stories about the Navajo code talkers and the Tuskegee airmen, “and then there was so much backlash, they had to put it all back up”, Kimmel laughed. “Imagine how racist you have to be to be racist against Jackie Robinson today.
“I don’t get it,” he deadpanned. “How can something like this happen under the president who’s done more for Black people than Abraham Lincoln? It makes no sense.”
The Daily Show
And on The Daily Show, Jordan Klepper also looked into the administration’s messy so-called war on woke. “Everything Trump has done so far has been sloppy,” he said. “Whether it’s Doge not knowing who they’re firing, Ice not knowing who they’re deporting, turns out they can’t even do a classic DEI purge right.”
Case in point: the removal of a story on the military record of Jackie Robinson from the Pentagon’s website, which provoked outrage. The Pentagon later said computer software was used to scrub DEI content from their website, but that the Robinson story was removed by mistake.
“Yeah – don’t blame us, blame our racist software!” Klepper exclaimed. “We should’ve never used ChatKKK.”
“The Jackie Robinson mistake wasn’t even the most embarrassing anti-DEI flub,” Klepper continued. Some files were removed because of the inclusion of the word “gay”, such as an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “That’s how lazy they were with this: they just Ctrl-F’d for gay-sounding keywords and deleted anything that showed up,” Klepper laughed.
He added: “Now kids won’t know about Enola Gay, they won’t know about transport planes, and they’ll never hear about the heroic service of Capt Grindr McScissoring. Tragic.”
