After leaving the National Prayer Breakfast at the Capitol earlier this month, President Donald Trump and his entourage slipped into the imposing ballroom at the Washington Hilton, where the real show was about to begin.

At the “unofficial” event on February 6, organized by the powerful and insular evangelical group known as “the Family,” Trump took a victory lap before the crowd of largely white evangelicals. These were the voters that had thrust him into power and they were eager to celebrate the rash of executive orders reversing decades-old civil rights advances.

“I don’t know if you’ve been watching but we got rid of woke over the last two weeks. Woke is gone-zo,” Trump said, to applause. “We’re a merit-based society now.”

With an assist from Elon Musk and his DOGE squad, Trump has made the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion a centerpiece of his new administration. For all the crowing about his early success — much of it greatly overinflated — Trump has simply flipped the script: Instead of creating a level playing field, he launched DEI for white Christians.

Trump’s bid to dismantle the legacy of the civil rights movement while using its own language is part and parcel of the Christian right’s playbook, according to Christine Reyna, a psychology professor at DePaul University who studies extremism.

“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims and portray their movement as a civil rights movement,” Reyna said. “And they’ve........

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