WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — From erasing the stories of Navajo “code talkers” on the Pentagon website to demolishing a “Black Lives Matter” mural in Washington, President Donald Trump’s assault on diversity across the United States government is dismantling decades of racial justice programs.

Delivering on a campaign promise, the Republican billionaire made it one of his first acts in office to terminate all federal government diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, which he said led to “illegal and immoral discrimination.”

The crackdown on DEI initiatives at the Pentagon has been broad, ranging from a ban on recruiting transgender troops — a move stayed by a court this week — to removing vast troves of documents and images from its website.

Earlier this month, Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin reported that Arlington National Cemetery had begun to wipe its website of the histories of Black, Hispanic and women war veterans.

“It’s a sad day when our own military is forced to turn its back on sharing the stories of the brave men and women, who have served this country with honor,” Levin wrote on his Substack.

“This insanity must stop.”

– ‘Woke cultural Marxism’ –
References to war heroes, military firsts, and even notable African Americans were among the swathe of images and articles marked for deletion, according to a database obtained by the Associated Press.

Among the more than 26,000 items marked to be removed were references to the Enola Gay, the US aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 — apparently because the plane’s name triggered a digital search for word associated with LGBT inclusion.

Other content removed by the Pentagon included stories on the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the first African American military aviators, and baseball legend and veteran Jackie Robinson.

Responding to a question on those and other removals, the Pentagon on Wednesday said it saluted the individuals, but refused to see “them through the prism of immutable characteristics.”

“(DEI) is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission,” said Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot.

He added that in “rare cases” that content was removed that should not have been, it would be restored — as was the case with the articles on Robinson and on Navajo “code talkers” — but defiantly stood by the purge as a whole.

– ‘Erase history’ –
Not everyone has been convinced by the Pentagon’s explanations around the purge.

Descendants of the Native Americans who played a vital role for US forces in World War II said they had been shocked to discover their ancestors’ heroic contributions had been effectively deleted from the public record.

“I definitely see it as an attempt to erase the history of people of color in general,” said Zonnie Gorman, daughter of military veteran Carl Gorman.

Carl Gorman was one of the young Navajo “code talkers” recruited by the US Navy in 1942 to test the use of their Indigenous language, whose complex structure made it an almost impossible-to-crack wartime code.

Several web pages detailing the role of the group, whose contribution was key to the United States’ victories in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945 in battles such as Iwo Jima, recently disappeared from the Pentagon’s site.

For Gorman, a historian, the action was an insult.

“From the very beginning, we are very invisible in this country, and so to have a story that was so well recognized for us as Indigenous people, that felt good,” she told AFP.

“And then this is like a slap in the face.”

– Chilling effect –
The US president’s move to end DEI programs has also affected more than just the federal government.

Since he won last year’s election, several major US corporations — including Google, Meta, Amazon and McDonalds — have either entirely scrapped or dramatically scaled back their DEI programs.

According to the New York Times, the number of companies on the S&P 500 that used the words “diversity, equity and inclusion” in company filings had fallen nearly 60 percent compared to 2024.

The American Civil Liberties Union says Trump’s policies have taken a “‘shock and awe’ approach that upends longstanding, bipartisan federal policy meant to open doors that had been unfairly closed.”

US federal anti-discrimination programs were born of the 1960s civil rights struggle, mainly led by Black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 saw other institutional forms of racism enforced.

Today, Black Americans and other minorities continue to disproportionately face police violence, incarceration, poverty, homelessness and hate crimes, according to official data.