Trump’s Successes All Point to Avoiding Entanglements

Since returning to office, President Trump has taken numerous actions that deserve recognition, not because they flatter anyone’s partisan instincts, but because they correct long-standing institutional failures that both parties have ignored for too long. One of the most significant steps has been the dismantling of USAID. For decades, the agency drifted far from any defensible conception of humanitarian aid or strategic development.

Instead of building infrastructure or supporting genuine disaster relief, USAID became a vehicle for exporting American political activism abroad and funding NGOs, advocacy groups, and even media entities aligned with ideological causes that had little to do with the national interests of the United States. At best, this represented waste. At worst, it amounted to taxpayers underwriting political manipulation abroad. Ending this arrangement is not isolationism. It is fiscal sanity and respect for responsible constitutional government.

Trump has also taken decisive steps toward deinstitutionalizing DEI and dismantling disparate impact theory across the federal government. These frameworks were never neutral tools designed to assure fairness. They functioned as ideological enforcement mechanisms, replacing merit with grievance metrics and exposing institutions to endless legal and bureaucratic paralysis. By rolling them back, the administration is restoring clarity and equal treatment under the law, rather than equal outcomes engineered through administrative power.

The same logic applies to the effort to dismantle the Department of Education. For all its size and expense, the department has failed to improve educational outcomes. It exists primarily as a compliance bureaucracy, issuing mandates, distributing funds through political channels, and expanding its own authority. Education policy is better handled at the local level, closer to families, communities, and states, where accountability can be tracked. Centralization has produced stagnation rather than excellence.