President Trump says Apple should eliminate DEI

Apple CEO Tim Cook meets with President Trump at the White House on Thursday, February 20, 2025 (image via Fox Business)
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday urged Apple, opens new tab to scrap its DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) policies, a day after AAPL shareholders voted against ceasing DEI efforts.

Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled in SFFA v. Harvard that discriminating on the basis of race in college admissions violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
As a result, the legality of corporate DEI programs was called into question and 13 Attorneys General warned that SFFA implicated corporate DEI programs.
This year, those implications widened when the Supreme Court ruled in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protected against discriminatory job transfers. The ruling also lowered the bar for employees to successfully sue their employers for discrimination, and is therefore likely to lead to an increase in discrimination claims.
Since SFFA, a number of DEI‑related lawsuits have been filed. Starbucks was successfully sued for discrimination by an employee for $25.6 million, and the risk of being sued for such discrimination is rising.
Many major companies have responded by rolling back their DEI commitments and laying off DEI departments. Alphabet and Meta cut DEI staff and DEI‑related investments; and Microsoft and Zoom laid off their entire DEI teams. Since Muldrow, John Deere publicly halted DEI‑related policies after Tractor Supply explicitly stated that it would “eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals;” Lowe’s and Ford ended their participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality (CEI); Harley Davidson ceased its DEI efforts; and Jack Daniels ended both its DEI efforts and CEI participation.
Reuters:
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Trump has criticized corporate DEI programs as discriminatory and suggested the U.S. Department of Justice could investigate if such efforts violate the law.
Proponents of the proposal against DEI argued that recent legal changes meant Apple would see an increase in discrimination cases if it continued such policies.
Apple has said it had an active oversight effort to avoid legal risks and that the proposal inappropriately restricted management.
CEO Tim Cook said at Tuesday’s meeting that Apple’s “strength has always come from hiring the very best people and then providing a culture of collaboration, one where people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives come together to innovate.” But he also said, “As the legal landscape around these issues evolves, we may need to make some changes to comply…”

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MacDailyNews Take: Unsurprisingly, Tim Cook cannot read the room; an anachronism clinging to an anachronism.
If, during his last decade plus of leading Apple, Cook spent 10% of the effort on Siri — which would have long ago led Apple directly, and very likely first, to genAI — as he does on his failed social engineering boondoggles, the company and Apple product users would be in a far, far better situation today.
Instead, enjoy your Apple Intelligence vaporware as Apple coders, over a period years, frantically pump it out in dribs and drabs years late. Siri today is basically the same half-baked, unreliable parlor trick it was on the day Tim Cook inherited it. So much promise squandered (which describes Apple’s Tim Cook era in a nutshell).
Getting the absolute best people should remain Apple’s ultimate goal. Forced diversity carries its own set of problems. Would the group be comprised of the best-qualifed people possible or would it be designed to hit pre-defined quotas? Would some employees, consciously or unconsciously, consider certain employees, or even themselves, to be tokens meant to fill a quota? That would be a suboptimal result for Apple and everyone involved.
The best and desired outcome is for the quest for diversity to work in Apple’s favor. Truly looking at qualified people from a larger pool would likely result in delivering different viewpoints and new ways of looking at things and tackling problems than a more homogenized workforce would likely be capable of delivering.
Regardless and of course, someday it sure would be nice for everyone to just be able to evaluate a person’s potential, not measuring and tabulating superficial, meaningless things like skin color and gender.
How do we ever get to the point where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” when we insist on judging people by the color of their skin? — MacDailyNews, December 31, 2015

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