It seemed as if the president just needed a little reassurance.
He was in the East Room of the White House, which was packed with jittery children, conservative activists, influencers and six Republican governors, from Florida, Texas, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa. All had come to watch him sign an executive order to gut the Education Department, something conservatives have dreamed of doing for decades. No other president had done it, not even this one the first time he was in office.
Now he was back, and there was the order, sitting atop a small desk at the front of that grandiose room, waiting to be signed.
All around his desk were lots of other little desks, the kind you sit at in grade school. Children of varying ages, dressed in school uniforms, sat swinging their legs under their desks. They looked up expectantly as Mr. Trump approached.
He turned to one small boy and said, “Should I do this?” The boy nodded eagerly. The president spun around and looked at a young girl. “Should I do it?” he asked. She nodded, too.
Encouraged, he sat down, pulled out his power pen and scrawled. The governors and the children and their parents burst into applause.
In some sense, Thursday’s executive order signing was on-brand for Mr. Trump. Whether he’s releasing files related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, purging the board of the Kennedy Center to appoint himself its head, or carving up the Education Department, this president takes pride in doing what none of the others would dare do.
But otherwise, this signing session was an odd one, as even he had to admit. He lacked that fiery conviction he usually brings to such affairs.
He kept emphasizing that what he was doing was not as radical as it might have seemed: “It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Department of Education. We’re going to eliminate it.”
In fact, only Congress can abolish a cabinet agency, but Mr. Trump’s order basically called on the Education Department to come up with a plan for shutting itself down.
He insisted that “everybody knows it’s right,” and he reminded the room that when the department was established, by President Jimmy Carter in the same room in which Mr. Trump was now destroying it, many Americans opposed the idea — even the “famed Democrat senator” Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the editorial board of this newspaper.
Mr. Trump recognized that he was putting his education secretary, Linda McMahon, out of a job, which was maybe a bit awkward. “We’re going to find something else for you to do, OK?” he told her.
He often describes people who make up the federal work force as being part of a shadowy cabal that he is all too happy to pulverize. Not so in this case. “They’re good people,” he said of the Education Department’s 4,200-person work force, many of whom he was effectively firing.
“I want to just make one little personal statement,” Mr. Trump said at one point. Teachers, he said, are among the most important people in the country and everyone ought to “cherish” them. At another point, he promised that money for the federal Pell Grant was not going to vanish. “Supposed to be a very good program,” he said.
What was interesting about Mr. Trump’s seeming ambivalence over this thing he was about to do was that everybody around him was so overwhelmingly ecstatic about it. The person who appeared least excited about what was happening was the one who was making it happen.
“I never thought we’d get any serious major education reform done, let alone dismantling the Department of Education,” said Terry Schilling, a 38-year-old father and activist from Burke, Va., a Washington suburb. He was there with his wife and six of their seven children. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said, bouncing a baby boy named Tucker on his shoulder, “and I’m just so happy to be here.”
There were activists in the room like Chaya Raichik, the creator of the influential Libs of TikTok account, and Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a parents rights group that worked hard to help elect Mr. Trump. This was exactly how they hoped a Trump restoration might go.
“You had a lot of Republican presidents promise this,” observed Penny Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America. Mr. Trump didn’t have the temerity to tear up the Education Department the last time he was president.
What changed?
“He had four years to think about it and plan,” Ms. Nance said. “All of us did, frankly.”
