During this period, Republicans also watched American culture shift dramatically. Companies and universities pledged to do more to support racial minorities, expanding their D.E.I. bureaucracies. Lia Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first transgender athlete to win a women’s N.C.A.A. Division I national championship. The October 7th attacks in Israel led to campus protests nationwide. Conservatives were particularly outraged by Joe Biden’s higher-ed agenda. Biden officials attempted to use the HEROES Act—a law passed after 9/11 allowing the government to waive student-loan requirements in a national emergency—to cancel billions in student debt, long after the pandemic’s peak. Bob Eitel, a senior counsellor at the Department of Education during the first Trump Administration, helped mobilize lawyers who ultimately challenged the debt-forgiveness efforts in court and won. The Biden Administration also pushed for colleges to allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. The proposal stalled, but Republicans saw it as a glaring federal overreach. Eitel said the Biden years made him feel that there was a “stark, almost unbridgeable difference” in the two parties’ understanding of reality.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter