It is no secret that Donald Trump is currently facing a host of criminal and civil litigation.
He is in court for the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president thanks to an indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. He recently posted $175 million bond in a New York civil fraud case brought by state Attorney General Letitia James. And he is awaiting next steps in the election interference case being prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia – in addition to two federal indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Never one to shy away from racializing, MSNBC’s Joy Reid couldn’t help but notice a common thread between Bragg, James, and Willis. She recently referred to the trio, who are all Black, as “my DEIs” and suggested Trump is bitter about the criminal cases against him because of the prosecutors’ race.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Heather Mac Donald, author of When Race Trumps Merit, to discuss Reid’s remarks and what she gets wrong about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
‘My DEIs’
As the New York ‘hush money’ trial against Trump kicked off in Manhattan criminal court last week, Reid was on the MSNBC airwaves praising the public officials responsible for the prosecution of the former president… for being Black.
REID: For me, there is something wonderfully poetic about the fact that despite the fact that, even if convicted, he’s not going to go to prison, the first person to actually criminally prosecute Donald Trump is a black Harvard grad [Bragg], the very kind of person that his former staff, the people who work for him, Steven Miller, etc, want to never be at Harvard Law School, but he was… And a black woman [Willis] is doing this same exact thing in Georgia. And a black woman [James] forced you to pay a $175 million fine…
Donald Trump is being held to account by the very multicultural, multiracial democracy that he’s trying to dismantle and, for me, there’s something poetic and actually wonderful about that. It says something good about our country that we’re still capable of having that happen. Go DEI. My DEIs are bringing it home.
Given the evidence – or lack thereof – in all three of the cases Reid referred to, Megyn questioned just how well those prosecutors are actually doing. “Instead of sitting back and asking ourselves, maybe Alvin Bragg doesn’t have it, maybe Alvin Bragg’s Harvard Law education didn’t exactly do for him what we had hoped, you’ve got the Joy Reids of the world having a very different reaction,” she noted.
As Megyn explained, Reid is “looking at Alvin Bragg going after Trump with an incomprehensible legal theory; Fani Willis down in Atlanta, who we know is utterly confused by what she is doing [because] she is too busy schtooping the boyfriend on the side and then lying under oath about it… and Letitia James… who has gone after Trump and won some $450 million dollars for a civil fraud that hurt absolutely no one” and “reveling” in their race rather than their legal acumen.
A Racial Reckoning
Mac Donald — whose new book is on the subject of race and merit — called Reid’s comments “truly extraordinary” in the way they missed the mark. “The left says if you don’t see my race, you’re not seeing me and, at the same time, they deny that there’s any biological reality to race,” she said. “Sorry, that’s anti-science… but, in any case, Reid is basically telling us to see the race of people within the law first and to expect a sort of race war coming out of the legal profession against [Trump].”
Since Reid, in Mac Donald’s words, “wants to play the race card,” she ran through a few stats about the impact of DEI policies on the law. For example, she said the Biden administration has prioritized racial and gender diversity when selecting judicial nominees, with 22 percent of the president’s “judicial picks in the first 16 months of his administration [being] Black females.”
She called this fact “a disaster” because statistics show that Black female lawyers only make up about 2 percent of the attorney population. “If you knew nothing more than that and you’re seeing about 22 percent of nominees and people being put on the bench being Black females, you know he is lowering standards,” she said.
According to Mac Donald, “the skills gap between Blacks on the one hand and whites and Asians on the other is so high that you cannot have diversity and meritocracy at the same time” and “any institution — like a university, a federal bar, a law firm — that tells you they’re opting for diversity is telling you they have discarded meritocratic standards.”
As such, Mac Donald said “you cannot have diversity and meritocracy on the bench at the same time” without “lowering the standards of our jurisprudence, the standards of our lawyers, the standards of our judges.”
You can check out Megyn’s interview with Mac Donald by tuning in to episode 774 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.