Amid the conspiracy-theory flurry following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump Saturday, right-wing pundits, media personalities and influencers have sought to add another narrative to the gauntlet: Women, by way of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), are at fault.
The claims stemmed from edited footage and images of the female agents in the GOP nominee's security detail that went viral over the weekend alongside clips of a 2023 CBS report that stated the Secret Service's aim to bump up the number of women in its ranks to 30 percent by 2030, according to Time. Most common among them are sexist jabs deriding the agents as too small, overweight and not capable of doing the job, Wired reports.
“This female agent couldn’t even holster her gun today during the attempted assassination of Trump. DEI hire?” Chaya Raichik, the rightwing influencer behind Libs of TikTok, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, of a Secret Service agent missing when attempting to holster her gun without looking. “DEI got someone killed," she added in a follow-up post.
A review conducted by Wired and researchers at nonprofit research organization Advance Democracy found that hundreds of posts on the Musk-owned platform make similar claims, with dozens garnering upwards of 1 million views.
The propagation of this narrative represents "a very clear effort to divert attention" from media reports that the shooter was a white man and registered with the Republican Party, according to Jennifer Saul, a University of Waterloo professor of philosophy whose research focuses on political language, including racist, sexist and deceptive speech.
"It's not useful to the Republicans to blame somebody like that. That's not politically helpful for them," Saul told Salon. "In fact, it's politically damaging for them. So there's, I think, a very clever effort to divert attention onto something that is a more useful object of blame."
In recent months, conservatives have brought into the mainstream what was once a refrain of the far-right fringe: blaming a companies' failures and missteps on its prioritization of DEI or calling professionals and leaders of color — particularly Black people — "DEI hires," alleging they only obtained their position through supposed privileging workplace initiatives.
Prominent right-wing influencers wielded the narrative against former Harvard University President Claudine Gay during the furor over her widely panned response to concerns of on-campus antisemitism at a Congressional hearing in December 2023. Earlier this year, the right lobbed the attack at Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott following the March bridge collapse and, just this month, described Vice President Kamala Harris as a "DEI hire" during the Democratic scramble over whether to give President Joe Biden's presidential candidacy the boot.
"DEI is the latest in a long line of dog whistles," coded words and phrases with a set political message intended for members of certain group to understand, "meant to trigger resentments rooted in racism and sexism, but presented instead as defenses of high principle," according to Ian Haney López, a UC Berkeley Law professor of public law and author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class."
The argument the far-right has leveled against DEI is that it "represents a violation of meritocracy that discriminates against white people and men, and white men especially," he told Salon.
Right-wing leaders and influencers have "spent quite some time already building up DEI as an immense force for evil and incompetence in the world, so there's a lot of negative associations and emotions that come with the use of the term DEI, which is very helpful for them," Saul added, explaining that the animus around "DEI" casts it as "an object of hostility" and its usage gets others' "emotions and anger going."
"It's been built up as a way of targeting that hostility at particular groups, the groups who are meant to be helped by DEI," she continued, arguing that the demonization of DEI makes it harder to speak out against the "huge amount of discrimination" left in the world and urge companies and organization to care about remedying it.
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Many of the posts circulating on X in the aftermath of the assassination attempt featured a clip of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle's interview with CBS News discussing a need to increase diversity in the agency. Other posts, according to Wired, included a viral image comparing a male Secret Service agent with a sniper rile and one of the female agents protecting Trump, captioned: “Secret Service agents before DEI and after DEI." (The male agent in the picture is a counter sniper, while the female agent assigned to Trump's detail is performing close protection, duties the Secret Service indicates are typically armed differently.)
Another widely shared photograph showed another female agent crouching behind the former president on stage — supposed evidence of why women shouldn't be allowed in the role, according to ultraconservative critics — despite video footage taken moments later showing that agent as part of the group surrounding Trump and escorting him off the stage.
Far-right political commentator and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza fanned the flames around the agents in a number of posts to X.
"Watch these female agents who have no clue what to do, or what they are doing," he wrote in one Sunday post over a clip of three female Secret Service agents frantically surrounding Trump's vehicle after he's secured inside. "The Secret Service has been trying to raise the number of its female recruits to meet a 30% goal. This is DEI!"
In an appearance on Fox News, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., put the blame for the shooting squarely on Cheatle, dubbing her a "DEI initiative person" and arguing, "this is what happens when you don’t put the best players in."
“This DEI agenda and the destruction of meritocracy is affecting the competence levels of these agencies,” former Trump-era attorney general Bill Barr also told Fox host Jesse Watters.
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Other media personalities decidedly upped the ante and said the not-so-quiet part out loud, espousing misogynistic rhetoric outlining so-called reasons why women are not equipped to be Secret Service agents.
"Women are not empowered by attaining jobs for which they are not qualified or well-suited, and neither a president nor any of us should be endangered to make someone feel better about their obvious limitations," tweeted Megyn Kelly, a far-right media personality and ex-Fox News host.
"We support women — of course, we do," Fox News host Laura Ingraham told "The Five" co-host Jeanine Pirro during a Sunday night segment discussing the Secret Service's protection of Trump after the shooting. "But when it comes to shielding the body of someone who is six-foot-three — shielding him, you can’t do it if you’re five-five."
Meghan McCain, former co-host of "The View" and the daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, shared a post from far-right commentator Matt Walsh of the female agents that argued: “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.”
"This is why the notion that men and women are the same is just absurd," she said on X. "You need to be taller than the candidate to protect them with your body. Why do they have these short women (one who can’t holster a gun apparently) guarding Trump? This is embarrassing and dangerous."
While assessing potential failures in the Secret Service response to the attempted assassination and deadly shooting is a worthy cause, focusing on the female Secret Service agents and the agency's director — and DEI — operates as a distraction from "another important place that we should look: who carried out the shooting," Saul said.
"Rather than look at the laws that allowed this man to get a gun or look at why this man carried out the attack," ultraconservatives have said, 'let's instead look at women as people to blame," she argued.
The narrative the right has crafted "distorts the fundamentally meritocratic aim of DEI," which aims to actually bolster meritocracy by "overcoming structural and cultural barriers to entry," Haney López said.
"But no matter, for the goal on the right is less to engage with actual policies and how they might or might not work, but instead to tell scare stories aimed at stoking the strong emotions of hatred and fear connected to supposed victimization," he added.
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