Hamilton vows to “just keep fighting” amid Trump push against diversity

Lewis Hamilton has vowed to “just keep fighting” as United States president Donald Trump’s administration has been clamping down on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programmes.

Over the first month of his second presidency, Trump made dismantling DEIA initiatives his priority with a slate of executive orders.

Decisions made since 20 January include banning words such as ‘disability’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender’ or ‘women’ from some government websites and reviewing research grants that feature any of those words; threatening to pull federal funding from organisations, including schools and colleges, unless they end programmes geared towards minorities, inclusive of disabled people; ordering army, sports, bathroom and visa bans for transgender people.

Hamilton, who has been an advocate for the Black and LGBTQ+ communities in the Formula 1 paddock, has been watching those developments with concern but says he remains as committed as ever to his own struggle for minorities.

“I’m not going to change what [Trump] does, or the government does – all I can do is try to make sure that in my space, in my environment, I’m trying to elevate people,” Hamilton told TIME.

“There’s going to be forces along the way that don’t want that, for whatever reason I can’t fathom. That doesn’t stop me. It is a fight that we’ll just keep fighting.”

Hamilton’s fight ramped up in 2020 after he noticed how few people from minority backgrounds featured on the 2019 end-of-season Mercedes team photo, which led him to start up the Hamilton Commission, a programme to improve representation in motorsport.

The following year, Hamilton launched Mission 44, whose goal has been to “support, champion and empower young people from underrepresented groups to succeed, by narrowing opportunity gaps across society”.

Back in 2020, racial minorities represented just 3% of the Mercedes squad’s workforce compared to 18% of the population of England in the 2021 census, but Hamilton pushed the team to launch the Accelerate 25 programme – committing to hiring people of colour at a 25% rate until 2025.

“I did think, oh my God, I’ve finally got a more diverse working environment we’ve built over time. And now I’m going back to the beginning of my time with Mercedes, where it wasn’t diverse,” the new Ferrari driver said.

Under Hamilton’s impetus, the Scuderia did sign a diversity and inclusion charter in November 2024.

However, having experienced discrimination in Italy when he was younger, the Briton is all too aware of the racism that persists in some parts of Italian society, particularly in sporting stadiums – just last year, football players Mike Maignan and Romelu Lukaku were targeted by monkey noises on separate occasions in the top-flight Serie A championship.

“I’m not going to lie, it definitely crossed my mind when I was thinking about my decision,” Hamilton admitted. “Like in so many things, it’s often such a small group of people that set that trend for many. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”

The passion surrounding his Ferrari debut seems to be proving him right.