Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.
Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.
Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.
Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.
“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.
Here is how the party got to this moment.