Yes, “The Daily Show,” is a comedy show. But host Jon Stewart made a serious point after President Trump, with no evidence, blamed a fatal air crash on diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI efforts to bring women and racial minorities into the federal workforce.

Trump is making a deliberate effort, Stewart said, to “make the default setting on competence in America a white guy.”

Pointing to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Stewart sarcastically said the television personalities got their jobs “purely based on merit. And smarts.”

Stephen A. Smith, the ESPN sports commentator, was not trying to be funny when he made a similarly stinging point about Trump’s promotion of Hegseth to Fox’s Sean Hannity.

Hegseth’s rise to “defense secretary of the United States overseeing 3.5 million people — that’s not qualified,” Smith said. He implied that Hegseth was a classic example of identity politics benefiting unqualified white men, such as those in Trump’s cabinet.

Trump’s preference for white men, even those with glaring flaws, was evident when he recently hired a white man who wrote last October that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Darren Beattie, now at the State Department, was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after speaking at a conference that had drawn white nationalists. Now, he is back in the Trump administration after

© The Hill