Andrew Miller: Trump’s attack on diversity fails to stack up but gives rise to his robotic vision

I confess to being an overly optimistic person. I tend to become calmer in a crisis. “Sure, we crashed the car down a hill, but we’re ok and home is not far away. What a lovely day for a walk.” It is the sort of flatline, unemotional state that is useful in medical emergencies, but can verge on appearing delusional to those trapped in my life’s orbit. Perhaps it’s a version of my mother’s “let’s have a cup of tea and never speak of it again” approach to life, death and the inconvenience in between. It thus came as a surprise when I experienced an unfamiliar sensation in my stomach recently. I was taking more than three minutes to fall truly, madly, deeply asleep after my Rooibos tea and carob-bear nightcap. The sheer volume of concerning world news had built up to a point where I was becoming - anxious! Like a Washington solar flare, President Donald Trump is going off again, interfering with our mass communications. By the end of his last term, we had grown used to constant outrage stoking, and were worn down by the pandemic newsfeed, so we had turned down our hearing aids and become comfortably numb. We’re now back to daily headlines that seem satirical. In between launching tariff wars and speculating about invading allies, he gets jealous of the coverage that fires, floods and aviation disasters get. He inserts himself into every story, making preposterous claims about who, or what is responsible. Things he or his allies have recently blamed on diversity, equity and inclusion policies (DEI): the failure of the secret service to prevent him being shot in the ear; the CrowdStrike internet outage; the Baltimore bridge collapse; the Los Angeles wildfires and last week’s uninvestigated tragic mid-air collision. His new posse of billionaire tech bros - who suddenly also don’t like DEI - were having their moment of awkward dancing in the spotlight, until DeepSeek set off a Chinese New Year firecracker under their monopolist plans. It’s hard to feel sorry for craven suck-ups with Bond-villain wealth and clothes, whose own large language models have been trained via wholesale pillage of intellectual property and government-subsidised microchip hoarding. They transparently dream of being able to replace workers with compliant hot robots, ala the movie Ex-Machina. Their blithering wet-pants discomfort renews my optimism for the project of western civilisation. The fundamental philosophy of Bertrand Russell is that we must deal with the facts as they are, not as we wish, or fear them to be. A supplement to this principle is best described in the Merchant of Venice: “truth will come to light... at the length truth will out.” The truth is - we all know that white guys have no monopoly on competence, and many only hold their positions - including some proposed US cabinet roles like Health - because of the calculus of loyalty given and demanded in return. The considerations are merit-free. Strategies for mass safety are common to aviation and healthcare. We plan with explicit recognition of human fallibility. This scientific honesty has also demonstrated that diversity improves, rather than worsens outcomes, for patients and passengers. Natsumi Saka’s recent meta-analysis - covering over five million operations - indicated that female surgeons’ patients have a lower mortality rate and a similar rate of complications and readmission to hospital to those of male surgeons. This does not mean every female surgeon is better, but it does mean that the days where nearly all were males of certain backgrounds were never truthfully justified by merit. The selection game had more to do with tradition and privilege than competence and patient welfare. I can live with a bit of anxiety - it might even do me some good - but a reminder that the truth will out has me sleeping again. You can’t fool all of the people, all of the time, and those who can’t truthfully contemplate their own faults - will fall.