Emma Green

So for this story, I spent a lot of time talking to both administration officials who work for the president now, but also people who were in that first Trump administration.

And the thing that all of them have said is that they wish they had gone farther.

Their perception was that their job was to come in, change some of the stuff that Obama had done that they didn't like, put some policies in place that could make incremental progress forward.

But they were coloring within the lines.

Even one of these officials who I talked to who was an advisor in the first administration in the Ed Department said that the things that they were doing now in 2025 would have been unthinkable in 2017.

So, for example, taking on a school like Harvard aggressively to say, we believe that you have violated your federal contract with us.

You've had this rampant anti-Semitism.

That's a violation of federal statute, but it's also a violation of your agreement with us.

We're going to freeze literally hundreds of millions of dollars.

That kind of muscular approach...

to higher education, and trying to aggressively step outside of incremental change to this idea of paradigm shift in the sector.

That's the huge shift.

I think reaction is definitely a good word for it.

And that tracks with how President Trump got reelected in 2024, the sense of backlash to where our culture had gone.

And I was talking to this advisor in the education department who had worked under the first Trump administration.

And he spoke about living through those Biden years and watching things like, for example, Leah Thomas win the NCAA championship.

The swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I think that unbridgeable worldview is really important because it shows why the Trump administration has been able and willing to act this aggressively in the higher ed sphere.

They see higher ed as the common theme in all of this cultural change, and they see that cultural change as being extreme, something that needs a really muscular response.

She was a policy deputy for Stephen Miller.