Betsy DeVos helped fuel the January 6 insurrection, and now she has chosen to simply walk away from it all. That’s a fitting end to DeVos’s tenure as President Trump’s Secretary of Education.
She played along with Trumpism right up until the last moment.
On January 7, the day after a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, DeVos submitted her letter of resignation to Trump, claiming, with less than two weeks left in her four-year term, that she could no longer tolerate the consequences of Trump’s behavior.
Instead of spending the last days of the Trump Administration basking in the glory of all that has been accomplished, DeVos’s letter noted, she and her fellow cabinet members were instead “left to clean up the mess” caused by pro-Trump rioters storming the Capitol.
Join the club, Betsy.
Many of us are now left cleaning up after Trump and his supporters, including DeVos. She played along with Trumpism right up until the last moment, when it was beginning to look like she may no longer be able to “wash the stink off,” as Jonathan Chait so aptly put it.
Beyond the figure of Trump himself, whom DeVos was clearly able to tolerate for years, she has in fact perpetrated many of the thoughtlines that helped create this moment, when homegrown extremism and white nationalism are openly flourishing.
Although, in her letter, she cites concern over the “impressionable children” who witnessed the armed insurrection at the Capitol, DeVos has hardly lifted a finger to help struggling children, both before and during her career as Education Secretary.
Prior to joining the Trump Administration, DeVos used her flush bank account as a billy club in her home state of Michigan, taking swipes at the very foundations of democracy—including public education—that are supposed to help level the playing field for all children.
DeVos is a billionaire by birth and by marriage. She is also an adherent to a very conservative, Christian ideology that appears to have defined her public service much more completely than any notion of the common good.
These two factors—her wealth and her religious affiliation—put her squarely in line with many of the most committed Trump enablers.
Journalist Katherine Stewart covered this in a recent opinion piece for The New York Times. Rather than paint January 6 as a day of unexpected horror, as DeVos attempts to do, Stewart describes the long—and openly—simmering movement to remake the United States into a decidedly Christian, fundamentalist country, by any means necessary.
And those means include a willingness to stick by Trump, even as his administration persisted in tearing children away from their parents at the Mexican border, for example, or pardoning the Blackwater employees who shot into a crowd of civilians in Iraq in 2007, killing a nine-year-old boy and sixteen other people.
By the way, the firm formerly known as Blackwater (now called Academi), was founded by DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince.
In her piece, Stewart focuses on Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. Hawley has come under increasing fire for pumping his fist at the gathering mob outside the Capitol on January 6, as he was on his way to do his part to undo President-Elect Biden’s victory.
Even after a frightening mix of white nationalists, giddy Trump supporters, and militarized rioters stormed into the Capitol, Hawley insisted on raising objections to the Electoral College results from a handful of key states. He was joined by more than a hundred fellow Republicans in this endeavor, but Stewart notes that Hawley has been actively participating in a Trump-like disinformation campaign for some time now.
Why? Because even a “corrupt sociopath” such as Trump, as Stewart says, was worth humoring along the way to the desired end game: destroying the liberal, moderate, and non-Christian aspects of U.S. society.
The portrait Stewart paints of Hawley and his affiliates is alarming. She links him to the American Renewal Project, an organization led by political activist David Lane. This group offers a “starkly binary and nihilistic” view of the United States, Stewart writes.
There can be no in-between. You are either a follower of Jesus Christ or you are a “pagan secularist.”
I have no evidence to link DeVos directly to either Lane or Hawley. Yet she has also persisted in attempting to foist her particular brand of Christianity on the American people, in Michigan and as Education Secretary.
Rather than demonstrate an allegiance to the common good, where public education is seen as an important foundation of our democracy, DeVos has instead promoted school-choice policies that would allow public tax dollars to flow to private, religious schools and unregulated charter schools.
Just months ago, DeVos appeared as a guest on a Christian radio talk show hosted by Tony Perkins. Perkins is the head of the Family Research Council, a wealthy nonprofit located in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to “reaffirm and promote the Judeo-Christian value system” of the United States.
On Perkins’s show, DeVos thanks President Trump for the 1776 Commission he put into place in 2020, as a way to help restore “patriotic education” to U.S. schools.
This is of utmost importance, DeVos tells Perkins, because those who do not know history will be “doomed to repeat it.” How true.
Instead of confronting the dangerous white, Christian, nationalist strains that are woven into the United States’ roots and its present culture, DeVos has simply chosen to walk away in this time of crisis.
She may be gone, but her legacy of intolerance and privatization, at the expense of millions of school children, will live on.