Trump is fulfilling an education promise Republicans made for decades

For decades, Republican presidential candidates have had a consistent education agenda: to dismantle the Department of Education and to bring much-needed reform to the universities.Yet Republican administrations have usually backed down from these promises after taking office, and their reforms have mostly fizzled.The Trump administration has broken the cycle.During the campaign, the president outlined an ambitious agenda for dismantling the federal education bureaucracy and addressing the problem of left-wing ideological capture in universities.But rather than abandon these ideas on Inauguration Day, his administration has pursued them with incredible grit, power and determination.Linda McMahon has already proven to be the most influential education secretary in the department’s history.

She has swiftly stripped more than a billion dollars in funding from left-wing race NGOs, terminated the employment of approximately half of the Department of Education’s bureaucrats, and put the president’s executive order on dismantling the department into action.Where others have cowered, McMahon didn’t even flinch.Likewise, on higher education, the new administration has taken unprecedented action, pausing billions of dollars in funding to Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, in part because these universities have violated the Civil Rights Act and continued to support discriminatory DEI programs.This marks another sea change.Conservatives have long been shy about enforcing civil rights law, which in practice has served as a left-wing rachet.By contrast, the Trump administration has signaled that civil rights law is not only for “oppressed” groups, but for all Americans — including whites, Asians and Jews, all of whom have been targeted for discrimination by the Ivy League universities.Although the inciting incident in the recent conflict is the explosion of antisemitism on elite campuses, the Trump administration understands that anti­semitism is merely a “nesti...