It took Donald Trump a week to come for the Naval Academy.

Since returning to the White House, the president is making America a reflection of himself — a whirling, twirling cloud of chaos, paranoia, fear and anger.

So you could be forgiven for missing the purge he has started at places where the minds of the U.S. armed forces are shaped: Annapolis, West Point, the Air Force and Coast Guard academies.

It’s worth paying attention to how this pans out. Trump’s order states:

“The Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall carefully review the leadership, curriculum, and instructors of the United States Service Academies and other defense academic institutions associated with their respective Departments to ensure alignment with this order.”

The order is “Restoring America’s Fighting Force,” signed on Jan. 27 with the Sharpie that the president wields like a scepter.

There’s been a howl of protest about his imperial decrees — threatening federal employees, cutting off funds, redrawing maps, alienating friends, terrifying immigrants, dictating gender and pronouns. He’s hurting the hornswoggled voters who elected Trump, who ignored the warnings in his felony convictions and the federal charges that never went to trial.

This one is no different.

“President Trump is once again engaging in culture war politics, and I want to be clear that the elimination of these programs directly undermines our military readiness,” said U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth, the freshman Democrat from Annapolis.

More than that, it is a contest to define America’s character, how we balance between an open and closed society.

Do we value tolerance and acceptance, or wall ourselves off from everything different or new — and damnation to those on the wrong side of that wall?

Are the opportunities of America open to all willing to contribute, or closed to those who don’t conform? We know Trump’s answer:

“Unfortunately, in recent years civilian and uniformed leadership alike have implemented Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and their attendant race and sex preferences within the Armed Forces,” Trump’s executive order reads. “These actions undermine leadership, merit, and unit cohesion, thereby eroding lethality and force readiness.”

No, they don’t. This is about purging the military of ideas and people, to quash a source of stability and resistance to tyranny.

“I believe strongly that diversity in all forms makes our institutions stronger, including the U.S. Naval Academy and our military,” Elfreth said.

In an email that followed Trump’s order, Naval Academy department heads asked instructors to scrub all course materials.

“We have been tasked to review our course material slide by slide, document by document, to verify there is no DEI content in any of the courses taught at USNA,” one email reads.

This is the Navy, after all. Obedience to the elected civilian government is the job.

“In accordance with the Department of Defense, the U.S. Naval Academy will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives,” an academy spokesperson said.

For now, leaders at the academy appear to be walking the line between culling programs and ideas.

“We are not looking to scrub every reference to diversity but rather to identify specifically if the concept of DEI (diversity and inclusion used together, referencing the program identified by the recent Executive Order) is present,” a department head wrote in the email, shared with me last week.

It had already begun scuttling its diversity initiative, including the elimination of the job of chief diversity officer.

And noticeably absent in recent days have been any announcements of Black History Month events that mids can attend.

This is just the beginning. Within 30 days of Trump’s order, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has to flesh out Trump’s plan.

Within 180 days, he has to report on progress to Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller.

Progress will probably look like this.

The U.S. Justice Department will settle the lawsuit filed last year by Students for Fair Admissions.

The group sued the Naval Academy in federal court to end its use of race in considering applications. It lost, with a federal judge agreeing that race-conscious admissions were acceptable at service academies working to achieve a military that represents America. The group promised to appeal.

The Republican president will fire White House appointees to the Board of Visitors, the academy’s bipartisan civilian oversight panel. He’ll name five ideologically pure replacements to help root out heretics.

And then attention will turn to instructors, academy leadership and through them, the future leaders of the Navy themselves.

I hope I’m wrong, but this is the plan spelled out by ideologues who hate the values of an open society.

It’s the plan behind Project 2025, the lawsuit challenging efforts to build a diverse military.

When Naval Academy Provost Samara Firebaugh stood before the Board of Visitors last month, she explained the importance of academic freedom. She told the board members, some of whom were angry that a history professor critical of candidate Trump had been invited to speak to midshipmen, that the academy’s job is to teach Navy and Marine Corps officers to think.

On the screen inside Hopper Hall, she displayed words on the importance of that freedom.

They were written by Admiral William S. Sims, who commanded naval forces during World War I, long before the dropping of barriers on race, gender and sexual identity made the armed forces better reflect the United States.

“A navy to be successful must be guided not only by men of ability but by men of an intellectual honesty that is proof against personal ambition or any other influences whatsoever.”

The outcome of this contest is far from certain. But after just one month in office, Trump has weakened the ideal of a thinking Navy.