Christopher Rufo Has Trump’s Ear and Wants to End DEI for Good

The first time then-President Donald Trump asked Christopher Rufo to come to Washington for a meeting with his team, the result was a 2020 executive order banning race or sex stereotyping in the federal government.

Now Rufo has an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, where he will present the president-elect’s team with a plan to geld American universities by withholding money if they don’t pull back on diversity measures. It is the latest chapter in Rufo’s quest to end activities that he says divide Americans and foster bias against different groups, including white men.

From his perch outside Seattle, the 40-year-old documentary filmmaker and writer has become one of the country’s most influential—and effective—culture warriors, waging public fights against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in schools, businesses and government.

Rufo exposed plagiarism in the academic scholarship of Harvard President Claudine Gay and in the writings of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. His reports played a role in Gay’s subsequent resignation in January of this year and damaged Harris’s campaign. He has also taken aim at diversity practices in large companies, most recently at Boeing.

A father of four who relishes throwing rhetorical grenades at the progressive left, he said he isn’t pursuing a role in the Trump administration but wants to help shape its agenda.

JD Vance, among many others in the new Trump administration, is listening.

Vance views Rufo as “a leading voice in the movement to restore merit and excellence” to universities, a spokeswoman said, adding that the vice president-elect believes Rufo “recognizes schools and universities exist to equip American students to face tomorrow’s challenges, not to indoctrinate them with the fringe beliefs of the far left.”

Rufo said he is meeting with members of the Trump administration next month. He has said he thinks colleges and universities have been taken over by the left, and he wants to recapture them by cutting federal money to schools that continue to engage in DEI practices. He also wants to excise race-based affirmative action from any institution with which the federal government does business.

He has a particular animus toward elite universities, which he says traded merit and rigor for neo-Marxism and discrimination against white and Asian people.

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In Trump’s second term Rufo sees an opportunity to finally excise the ideology that has animated his campaigns. His stated goal: make America a colorblind society by eliminating rules that mandate behavior or special treatment according to race.

Rufo said he has succeeded in demonizing CRT and DEI in the public’s mind. Now he wants to uproot what he sees as an administrative state that keeps the policies in place across universities, government and businesses. Rufo, along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, says Trump should reverse President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order establishing affirmative action in the federal government.

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Rufo supports closing the Education Department and forcing schools to advertise the earnings of graduates from specific programs so students understand their risks when they enroll. If students default on their loans, he says universities should have responsibility for paying some of it back.

Ultimately, Rufo would like to see the number of Americans who enroll in four-year colleges slashed by more than half.

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