Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that President Donald Trump is “using” DEI as a way of “ripping out entire aspects of our government.”

Host Dana Bash said, “President Trump and Elon Musk are, as you know, taking sweeping steps to reverse DEI initiatives across the United States. The president says he’s actually protecting civil rights and making society, quote, colorblind and merit-based. Your response?”

Booker said, “This is stunning to me, especially because they’re they’re really charging this word DEI as if it’s something that undermines the ability for the government to hire the best people. It’s actually the opposite of that. When we’re trying to hire the best of the best, having a more inclusive search to go to HBCU or Hispanic serving institutions to find as big of an applicant pool as possible. To me, these are the kinds of things that help us to hire the best of the best. What Donald Trump is doing is successively lying to people under the guise of some noble ideal.”

He continued, “Donald Trump wants to try to demonize ideas of inclusion, of equity, of fairness. And that is unfortunate and frustrating. And he’s using that as a way of ripping out entire aspects of our government that are vital.”

Booker added, “We should be outraged that organizations and agencies created by Congress in a bipartisan way have now been torn down by a president who has no authority or does not have the legal justification for doing that. So I understand that they want to distract you over here by talking about trans people. They want to talk about DEI. They want to talk about all these things as a distraction to the truth of what they’re doing, which is making us less safe, making government more corrupt, making violating people’s privacy.”