Attorney General Laura Ingraham. Education Secretary Chris Rufo. Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

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Christopher Rufo, the U.S. Secretary of Education, watched the hearing with delight. It was early November 2025, almost exactly a year since Donald Trump had won his second term to the White House. Already, the nation had changed under his watch, with today’s hearing on educational indoctrination only the latest evidence of the transformation at work.

Michelle Obama had not been president of Harvard University for six months, and if this grilling before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions stayed on track (and it would, because the staff of each Republican senator on the committee had been coached by White House director of legislative affairs Madison Cawthorn on which questions to ask, when, and how; the afternoon producers on Fox News had been similarly prepped), she was going to make her predecessor Claudine Gay look like a long-termer.

It was delicious stuff, watching the former first lady squirm. Having already landed a couple of haymakers during the first round of questioning, the committee’s chairman, Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance—President Trump’s favorite bulldog on Capitol Hill and already a 2028 presidential favorite—was now launching a stemwinder about “rooting out the cancer of wokeness.” Fox News turned its camera on Michelle, who looked as if she might kill Vance—or, if this continued, herself.

Secretary Rufo muted the television and rose. He was still getting used to his office, a plain room in a concrete building on Maryland Avenue, nothing like the sumptuous quarters overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue that Attorney General Laura Ingraham crowed about every time he saw her in one of the Old Ebbitt Grill back rooms, drinking what she claimed was a club soda, gossiping with special assistant to the president Chaya Raichik—better known as Libs of TikTok—about the latest West Wing intrigue. She really needed to get her ass in gear, Rufo thought. There was no time to waste. President Trump’s second term was flying by, and even if he managed to extend that term by a year or two—White House counsel Kimberly Guilfoyle was just polishing up her memorandum on how to postpone the 2028 election—there was too much work left for foot-dragging.