The remarkable first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term show what can be done to advance the national interest when there is a legitimate political will to improve the lives of the nation’s citizens and a no-nonsense businessman at the helm. Consider Trump’s crackdown on the important, but little-known, United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Trump’s reforms evoked a visceral response from Democrats and their patrons in the federal workforce—which include, it turns out, members of our legacy media. The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency revealed that government agencies including USAID paid $8.2 million to the left-leaning media company Politico for premium subscription services.The fake press has told us that USAID performs crucially important work at a relatively low cost—just $40 billion per year, which is less than 1 percent of the trillions the U.S. spends annually.

In truth, that’s a ton of money. But what does it buy? The facile, cosmopolitan answer is repeat something one has heard about “soft power.” It’s a vaporous term that can mean almost anything. But power, real power, is the ability to get what you want. By that metric, it’s difficult to say what good USAID has actually bestowed on the United States.

It certainly hasn’t purchased the goodwill of the Third World, which remains as hostile and backward as ever. The Somali-born Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is an example of what America’s “soft power” can buy. She is an unapologetic hater of the West, of  her adopted country, and on more than one occasion she has expressed unabashed solidarity with her co-ethnics above all else. Of course, it comes as no surprise that Omar believes USAID is integral to America’s identity. Unfortunately, her entitled, hostile attitude is far from uncommon among Third World immigrants.

Soft power not only has failed to defend our national borders, it also has facilitated a massive, unwanted influx across them. The prime beneficiaries of soft power have been foreigners, foreign governments, and thousands of probably unemployable activists in the grift-soaked nonprofit world. These NGOs have advanced a radical leftist agenda of feminism, LGBTQIA+ nonsense, open borders and “human rights” on taxpayers’ dime. This is all public information.

Even if it were not the case that USAID is a slush fund for leftist apparatchiks, America is not the world’s nanny, nor should it aspire to that status when our own country is in decline. In every metric, from public health to education America is in a deep domestic crisis. The decline of America’s core population ought to serve as a particularly good reason to cut off the welfare spigot to sub-Saharan Africa, where the population is rapidly growing. There is no reason to welcome this development. The artificial, feel-good ideology of “humanitarianism” not only ignores our national interest, it also obliges the West to commit democide on its own people.

The average American may have figured out by now that the government does whatever it chooses to do. Think of the improvements that might have been made with the billions laundered through USAID, to say nothing of billions lavished on the permanent alien population. Our country might have funded a border wall and mass deportations long before the number of aliens swelled into the tens of millions.

Trump has shown that the inaction of the state is entirely the choice of those managing it. He has exposed the self-serving, ideologically driven nature of the political system, and the infection is by no means partisan. Trump’s bold streak of executive action has created quick, tangible results that eluded Republicans for generations, especially so-called limited government conservatives. Reforming USAID will not eliminate all government bloat, or even necessarily win many votes for Trump. It’s possible that most Americans have never heard of USAID. But it is a soft, easy target and a good start toward making politics matter again.

Politics has been divorced for too long from reality. Endless babble about “democracy” or, in this instance, “soft power” has created a public demand for decisive leadership that acts, not talks, in the interest of Americans. In a time of unsustainable mass immigration, economic insecurity and chronic public disorder abetted by soft leaders, there is sure to be limited support for lavishing the public treasury on exotic political projects around the world. If the USAID fight is any indication of what the next four years will be like, Trump is going to have a successful presidency, and his opposition will continue to marginalize itself.