Ex-UVA President Rips MAGA Governor Over Trump’s DEI Attacks

The recently ousted leader of the University of Virginia released a tell-all memo Friday on the DEI feud with Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin that cost him his job.

In a 12-page letter to the university’s Faculty Senate, former UVA President James E. Ryan detailed how Youngkin had mischaracterized the university’s decision regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, landing it in hot water with the Trump administration and its overzealous Justice Department. The DOJ promised to “bleed UVA white” before Ryan resigned.

Ryan said his experience differed “in significant parts” from previous accounts, including from Youngkin and the school’s rector, Rachel Sheridan.

In March 2025, the school received a resolution, drafted by Youngkin’s office, on how it should handle DEI policies under Donald Trump’s second term. Ryan noted that it was the first such time that Youngkin had acted on the school’s behalf in his seven years atop the institution.

The school, however, did not adopt the resolution in full, according to Ryan. Instead, the resolution was whittled down to something that even the board’s Democratic appointees found palatable: the dissolution of UVA’s central DEI office and a reshuffling of permissible programs.

But that night, Youngkin went on Fox News with a very different message for the nation—claiming that the university board had done “something radical and sweeping” by declaring that “DEI is dead.”

“Dead” was a difficult term to decipher, according to Ryan, who noted that “it’s not clear even today what it means to kill DEI, and the governor didn’t go much beyond the soundbite.”

“For example, did it mean that we could no longer try to recruit qualified first-generation students from rural parts of Virginia, or offer financial aid, or even serve matzah in the dining halls during Passover, because each of those efforts would be advancing diversity, equity, and/or inclusion?” Ryan speculated.

While the parameters of Youngkin’s Trump-inspired DEI goals remained obfuscated, the Republican governor successfully set the University of Virginia up for failure.

The school did what it said it would do, in accordance with the agreed-upon resolution. Part of that involved a thorough review of the college’s many schools, which the school deemed would require more than the original 30-day allotted timeframe. It was Sheridan, who was then serving as chair of the board audit committee, who demanded that school officials with knowledge of the shifting DEI policies remain silent until the university board had a chance to meet.

That turned out to be a huge problem.

“Having to remain silent about our response to the Board resolution left us in a difficult position because our community was curious about the changes and what it might mean for them,” Ryan argued. “At the same time, external critics interpreted our silence as inaction. We explained to Board members that we were being placed in an untenable position, given that we could not implement any changes if we could not even discuss them publicly.

“We also pointed out that the Board had merely asked for an update, which implied that more work could still be done. But they nonetheless insisted that we remain quiet. So began the narrative that we were recalcitrant and resistant to any changes, which was not true but would continue up and through my forced resignation,” Ryan wrote.

Further still, Youngkin’s comments had created false expectations in the Trump administration as to how the university would navigate the DEI demands. Three weeks after the school submitted its update to the board in late April, the school received a letter from the Justice Department, inquiring why they had not complied with the board’s resolution, using language that was more aligned with Youngkin’s remarks on Fox News than the actual text of the approved memo.

“It was unclear, and still is, why the United States Department of Justice would have the interest or authority to enforce a resolution of the Board of a state university as opposed to enforcing federal law,” Ryan wrote.

In the ensuing months, a group of UVA alumni at the Justice Department took aim at their old school. Ryan recollects the school’s communications with this DOJ team, noting that “neither of the DOJ lawyers were fans of mine.” He also chronicles the process of compiling hundreds of pages’ worth of admissions data for the Justice Department—only to have the agency turn around and mischaracterize the school’s approved requests for extensions as attempts to “stall” the process.

“Why our own lawyers did not seem to understand or appreciate that submitting information in stages would be better than submitting nothing at all, especially given the false accusations that we were stonewalling, remains a mystery to me,” Ryan continued. “I do not know if they were exercising their independent judgment or receiving directions from a Board member and/or the Attorney General’s office.”

Ryan issued his letter a day after Sheridan penned her own account of the Trump administration–infused events leading to the university president’s ouster. The boiling drama adds another flair to tensions between Youngkin and his successor, Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, who has questioned the Youngkin-appointed board’s influence over UVA’s ability to select Ryan’s replacement.

In a Friday post, the president has ordered the DOJ to jump into an investigation of Democrats in the Epstein emails, threatening us all with a good time.

President Donald Trump had another one of his patented social media meltdowns Friday morning as he demanded a federal investigation into any of the Democrats mentioned in recent emails released from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. Never mind that dozens of those same emails also mentioned the convicted sex offender’s awkwardly close ties to the president himself.

Seemingly as payback for the Democrats using the “Epstein hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans” to “deflect” from the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Trump said that he would direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into Epstein’s ties to various Democrats mentioned in the trove of documents. The president’s list of targets would include former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. (Trump also said the investigation would focus on J.P. Morgan and “Chase” as if the long-dead financier and the Chase Manhattan Bank of the 1950s were separate individuals.)

“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats. Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island,’” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. (Epstein claimed multiple times in his emails that Clinton had never been to his home in the Virgin Islands.)

None of the documents released this week directly implicate Trump in any of Epstein’s alleged criminal activity, but they do directly suggest that Trump may have known about it, while fleshing out aspects of a relationship that seemed close—and to varying degrees salacious.

In emails released by Democrats, Epstein claimed that Trump “knew about the girls,” had spent hours in Epstein’s home with one of his victims, and called him the “dog that hasn’t barked.” In emails released by Republicans, Epstein suggested that he knew “how dirty Donald is,” said Trump didn’t have “one decent cell” in his body, and made multiple comments that suggested the two spent time together after he was in office.

Other prominent Republicans were also mentioned in the thousands of documents, including billionaire apocalypse prophet Peter Thiel and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon. In one email exchange with Epstein, Bannon said he couldn’t believe no one was making “the connective tissue” between Trump and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s (then Prince Andrew) alleged sexual abuse of Virginia Giuffre. In another, Epstein gave Bannon advice on how to help Trump.

Clearly incensed by the recent reporting, Trump also shared a video clip from Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime to Truth Social, in which Watters lamented the Democrats’ “smear campaign disguised as a bombshell,” and claimed the only thing that the emails revealed was Trump’s “deep ties to liberals.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s email correspondence, released by the House Oversight Committee this week, implicates many powerful people, particularly President Trump. One email chain in particular seems to allude to Trump performing a lewd act.

The thread in question from March 2018 is between Epstein and his brother Mark, who asked the billionaire child sex offender, “What is your boy Donald up to now?” Epstein replied things were “all good” and that Steve Bannon, the president’s onetime adviser, was with him. Mark then emailed his brother, “Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?”

The billionaire replied, “and i thought- I had tsuris,” using the Yiddish word for troubles. Mark’s reply then alludes to a prison movie: “You and your boy Donnie can make a remake of the movie Get Hard.”

Mark’s comment could either be a joke or a reference to an actual event. It’s not clear who Bubba is, but commentators on social media had a field day. Many noted that it is one of President Clinton’s nicknames, and Clinton also had a relationship with Epstein as well as Trump.

Is this real, or a disgusting joke between brothers? Trump has not directly addressed this email and has only taken shots at Clinton and others implicated in the released correspondence. The allusion to another piece of “kompromat” that Putin has over Trump seems to have irked the president, as he railed against another “Russia, Russia, Russia Scam” on Truth Social Friday morning.

With all of the sexual assault allegations against Epstein and Trump, the emails could point to something genuine. Regardless, the fact that the government has not yet released its full trove of Epstein files could mean that this is only the beginning.

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called fully releasing the Epstein files “the easiest thing in the world,” while accusing President Trump of “gaslighting” the American people.

The president continues to deny everything and unsuccessfully pressure other GOPers not to sign the House’s discharge petition. Greene sees Trump’s efforts to block the Epstein files and delegitimize his victims as a distraction from key issues like health care access and affordability.

“This is me wanting my party to do something, to win and do something good for the American people. It’s not me going against, it’s me pushing my party to say, this is what we need to be doing,” Greene told Politico. “Releasing the Epstein files is the easiest thing in the world.... Just release it all, let the American people sort through every bit of it, and, you know, support the victims. That’s just like the most common sense, easiest thing in the world. But to spend any effort trying to stop it makes—it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

In another interview Thursday evening, she even accused the president of “gaslighting” Americans about rising prices.

“President Trump and his administration [do] deserve a lot of credit for lowering inflation and holding it steady, but that doesn’t bring prices down. And so gaslighting the people and trying to tell them that prices have come down is not helping,” she said on The Sean Spicer Show.

MAGA’s most hard-line representative has now split with Trump on releasing the Epstein files, on health care access and inflation, and on foreign policy. Only time will tell if her heel turn remains true.

“I’m just speaking for myself, I’m America first. I am 100 percent for my country, no other country,” Greene continued. “That’s what a lot of people thought they voted for in 2024.... It’s a failure of our Republican majority in the House and the Republican majority in the Senate, if we aren’t legislating that way and making that happen.... I don’t see how we win the midterms on the course that we’ve been set on so far.”

Ellen Mei, a program specialist at USDA, was one of the thousands of federal employees who were furloughed during the record 43-day pause. But her time at the agency will soon come to a permanent close, all because she discussed the reality of SNAP benefits on MSNBC, reported The Washington Post.

The Trump administration walked back a pledge it made to continue funding the food assistance program, allowing the benefits to partially expire for more than 42 million Americans earlier this month. It did this despite the fact that the USDA had available funds that were specifically earmarked to cover the cost of SNAP during the shutdown.

Mei’s interview was no different from the dozens of others that she had participated in during her tenure as a government employee. Mei, who is also president of the National Treasury Employees Union for the Northeast division, told MSNBC on October 2 that she was speaking on behalf of herself and her union rather than the agriculture agency. Every detail she discussed with regard to SNAP and the shutdown was already publicly available information, either by way of news coverage, advocacy groups, or think tanks.

But the next day, Mei was notified by a USDA human resources representative that her employment would be terminated by the end of the month, and was accused of discussing the agency “without prior approval.” Mei interpreted the letter as retaliation for voicing her opinion on the machinations of the Trump administration.

“As I was and have been speaking in my personal capacity and in my capacity as union representative, I am not required to ask for permission to speak on behalf of me or my co-workers,” Mei told the Post. “Especially speaking on behalf of my co-workers as the union president, that is a right that I am granted by the Federal Labor Management statute. So I do not need to ask for permission.”

In a follow-up interview with MSNBC, Mei said she was “honestly really confused” by the termination notice.

“The New York Times and NPR had already published everything that I had said about SNAP and WIC,” Mei told the network, adding that some of what she discussed was also on the public-facing USDA website.