Now, five years later, the academy has banished talk of systemic inequity, abolished student affinity clubs for women and minorities, and instructed faculty to purge terms such as “feminist” and “systemic racism” from syllabi, all at the order of their commander in chief.

Returning to address graduates on Saturday, he arrived at a different West Point: one his administration has swiftly reshaped to reflect his worldview.

“You are the first West Point graduates of the golden age of America,” Trump said, adding later, “We’ve turned it around.”

Trump, who gave the speech wearing a hat emblazoned with his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” intertwined his political ideology with words about the military’s success. He said that as president, he had rebuilt the military “better than ever before” and rid it of “social experiments” like the teaching of critical race theory and efforts to support transgender soldiers. And he took credit for a rise in military recruitment.

Trump also made a point to criticize his predecessor, Joe Biden, and what he cast as liberal ideas, claiming that politicians “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects” and declaring, “We will not have men playing women’s sports.”

“It’s a feeling of real whiplash,” said Graham Parsons, a former West Point professor who resigned from America’s oldest service academy after publicly criticizing the impact of Trump’s policies. “We used to raise the possibility that in the military and beyond, there are still real structural problems with racism and sexism. That would not fly now.”

Since reclaiming the White House, Trump has set his sights on institutions of higher education as keys to unraveling the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that he says have corrupted American culture. In some instances, he has experienced challenges from the courts or universities as they dispute the limits of his power. But at West Point, an institution run by the Pentagon, the president can, for the most part, have his way.

Several professors and military observers said the changes implemented at the academy in response to Trump’s executive orders have thrust the historically nonpartisan institution into the partisan fray.

“Critics are saying that the administration does not seem to understand that and is making reckless changes to the ways we develop military leaders,” said Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University and an expert on civil-military relations.

In a statement, the White House said Trump’s predecessor had politicized the armed services.

“After Joe Biden spent four years injecting DEI, gender ideology, and woke politics into military policy, President Trump is restoring a military that is solely based on excellence, readiness, and lethality,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “On the battlefield, there can be no accommodation for anything less than resilience, strength, and the ability to withstand extraordinary physical demands.”

Less than six months into his second term, Trump has already made his mark on the military.

In January, he endured a bruising political fight over his pick for defense secretary, former “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth, batting down allegations of misconduct to elevate a leader who shared his view that a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion had weakened the military.

Since then, Trump and Hegseth have fired at least nine senior military officers who regularly touted diversity training as a strength during the Biden administration. They have declared that DEI policies “are incompatible with the values” of the Defense Department and prohibited academies from teaching what they have called “critical race theory,” which Republicans made a flash point during the presidential campaign.

Hegseth has said the policy changes are aimed at increasing the lethality of the nation’s fighting forces, even as the administration has stated its intention to limit the nation’s participation in armed conflict.

In signing the executive order, Trump said he was “committed to meritocracy and to the elimination of race-based and sex-based discrimination” in the U.S. Armed Forces.

This holiday weekend, Trump’s schedule will be bookended by military-centric events. On Monday, he is scheduled to attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Vice President JD Vance, who is also expected to attend the Arlington ceremony on Monday, gave his own address to military graduates on Friday, telling U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen that the administration’s change in approach to deploying military force meant the United States “ought to be cautious in deciding to throw a punch.” He did not spend time discussing the academic standards at the institution.

And on June 14, the White House has planned a multimillion-dollar military parade on the National Mall to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army — a date that coincides with the president’s birthday.

Across military academies, some students and faculty have subtly resisted the Trump administration’s decrees, hoping to maintain an academic culture that tolerates disparate political views and fosters racial diversity.

At the U.S. Naval Academy, some midshipmen have started using nongovernment email addresses to run underground versions of the same affinity clubs disbanded by their administration. Others have used the new email addresses to communicate their concerns about banned books or shuttered clubs to professors, according to three faculty members interviewed by The Washington Post. The faculty spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional retribution. Military officers who use “contemptuous words” against the president and other federal officials can be court-martialed, according to the military code of conduct.

At West Point, some faculty have tweaked language in their syllabi to comply while continuing to teach the same topics, said Parsons.

Parsons, who taught philosophy and military ethics at the academy, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that Trump had so changed West Point that Parsons was “ashamed to be associated with the academy.”

“Once a school that strove to give cadets the broad-based, critical-minded, nonpartisan education they need for careers as Army officers, [West Point] was suddenly eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration.”

After it published, the school launched an investigation into “allegations of misconduct,” he said. Parsons said he resigned before he was fired.

His last day was Friday, a day before Trump was set to address his former students.

Spokespeople for the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy did not return requests for comment Friday.

A Naval Academy professor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said he has told his students “there is a point where compliance turns into complicity.”

That professor said he has already seen academic consequences related to Trump’s rhetoric and directives.

Students once felt free to debate affirmative action, abortion and gun control. They argued about whether the country should lean more interventionist or more isolationist, the professor said.

Then Trump issued the executive order, which was soon followed by Hegseth’s memo that abolished “DEI offices and any vestiges of such offices,” banned instruction on race or gender, and told professors to teach that “America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”

Faculty have since been told to run their research through an AI screening tool to determine whether they are compliant with the new guidelines, documents show. The device then flags words including “barrier,” “Black,” “allyship,” “cultural differences” and the “Gulf of Mexico” that do not comply with Trump’s executive order, the provost told faculty in a newsletter reviewed by The Post.

“We at the Naval Academy are here to prepare young officers to command. They need to know what we have learned from our study of politics and history and literature and languages,” the professor said. “We are failing them and we are failing in our jobs if we suppress some things we know are true and we parrot other things we know are false.”

The tension has come up in class and in individual exchanges with cadets. The professor said he has counseled students who feel torn about deployment, caught between their belief in service to the country and their worries about the president who would give their orders.

He advised them to serve until they face an order they believe to be illegal.

If that point comes, he told them, “reject it rather than compromise yourself.”

Natalie Allison contributed to this report.