After the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, numerous reviews highlighted both the good and the bad. Most of the good focused on the complete stoppage of the porous border that Mr. Biden created. Most of the harshest hit at his misguided trade war, with some (rightly so!) focusing on his abominable siding with Russia, China, and North Korea against Ukraine at the UN. There was so much going on, both positive and some negative, that it was really hard to say whether he would succeed or not. But one thing that was very, very clear is that we have a president again, after four years of having a diminished figurehead who was nursed from meeting to meeting, with very little public exposure. So what is my (late) assessment of the start of Trump II? Back in November of 2023, I argued that the biggest issue that our country faced was that our young people were being taught to hate their country. Sure the national debt was a monstrous problem (and growing), but the most strategic long-term problem is when a society loathes itself. Which is exactly what the left through its control of institutions has been doing for decades, culminating in reactions to the brutal Hamas attacks on Israel on college campuses (not Cedarville U!). My vanity requires a short reposting of some of that argument:

But what would be the most important political issue that we face, i.e., something that we should expect the next president to address?

I want to suggest that our #1 problem is that our young people are being taught to hate their country and our institutions. While this is primarily on the left with their focus on critical theory, or alternatively cultural marxism, it is often now on the right in their views of the FBI or the Department of Justice.* We’ve known it for quite some time, but since it didn’t manifest itself publicly in a big way, it was something that was not seen as critically important. Sure the young people aren’t as patriotic as previous generations:

In addition to party identification, age appears to significantly affect Americans’ national pride. Whereas 50% of U.S. adults aged 55 and older say they are extremely proud to be American, 40% of those aged 35 to 54 and 18% of 18- to 34-year-olds say the same.

But eventually they’ll grow up. After all, do they really want any of the alternatives?

And then Hamas attacked Israel and suddenly we saw the depth of the rot in young people. And any sane person would ask, where did this anti-Semitism come from? 

I subsequently argued that I wasn’t sure exactly what to do about it, but we needed to start at the Department of Education and go full bore with school choice. The context of that original post was a implicit lament that the two candidates were not talking about the most critical issue our country faced. Yet while there was no discussion in the terms I mentioned, the Trump Administration has implemented a full scale assault on the core method of critical theory implementation: DEI.

I just finished reading Built to Beat Chaos: Biblical Wisdom for Leading Yourself and Others.* In it, the author argues chaos is just when there are so many potential opportunities to act that it’s hard to focus on a solution, and we tend to get overwhelmed. In this book, we are challenged to view chaos through God’s eyes, and remember our task in the Garden, to bring order out of chaos. And I couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump**. Donald Trump creates chaos by expanding the set of options with any issue. Sure all the usual options are available, but at least the initial Trumpian Art of the Deal will insist those are the worst possible options, only there because some prior incompetent didn’t negotiate well. But now we can add innumberable previously unthinkable options, such as trade wars. Yes he’s Captain Chaos. But can he fulfill his Imago Dei cultural mandate to bring order out of that chaos? I certainly hope so, and he needs to.

In my previous article I noted the lack of willingness to serve in the military as one indicator of the scale of the problem. But in a few short months the recruiting problems of the military have completely reversed. DEI is on the way out everywhere, even in corporate America. But nowhere is this more important than getting it out of the military, which Pete Hegseth and (hopefully) Matt Lohmeier*** are committed to eliminating this scourge. Yet in the long term, the educational system must be completely revamped, beginning with the Department of Education, and the progressive institutions of change that it funds, such as Harvard. Can you imagine anyone other than Donald Trump taking on these progressive cultural institutions that are rotten to the core? I can’t. If you don’t think they are rotten to the core, just read some of Harvard’s own self-report on its investigation into anti-semitism on campus. Progressives will often try to counter criticisms of DEI by saying don’t you want to help those historically disadvantaged to have a hand up? But when you look at what they are actually after, it is soooo much more. Consider this chart shown in DEI training at Harvard (page 150 of the linked report):

It’s interesting to see that support of free trade and apparently NAFTA makes you a white supremacist, as well as being part of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). So I’m at least three times a white supremacist. Ironically, I suppose that Mr. Trump’s hostility to free trade and NAFTA must make the DEI crowd just love Mr. Trump as a fellow traveler! Further, since mass incarceration is on their list of covert white supremacy, and Mr. Trump signed a big criminal justice reform in his first term, they must be cheering him for that too! Doubtful. For a reprise of some of Mr. Trump’s many actions against the corruption in our education system from within the system, check this out.

It’s also encouraging to see how young people are coming around to conservatism. Maybe not the conservatism I want, but the momentum is definitely away from the DEI self-loathing that is the province of the left. Make America Love Itself Again!

* Love to hear in the comments what you’re reading right now, and why.

** Which is exactly what Mr. Trump wants–for each of us to be thinking about him! Not sure whether he cares whether we adore or hate him, but he wants to be the straw that stirs the drink!

*** Nominated for Under Secretary of the Air Force, a former Squadron Commander in the USAF removed from command for publishing a book about how marxism was infecting the military through DEI.