The old-guard GOP dropped the ball for decades. Trump delivered in 6 months.

On Sunday, the second Trump administration turned six months old.

President Trump’s first four years in the White House were already a big success, which is why I fought so hard to bring him back for a second go-round. Yet I think Trump’s second has already surpassed it in just one-eighth the time.

The administration hasn’t just said the right things. It has done the right things.

Completely and instantly securing the U.S.-Mexico border after the four-year Joe Biden invasion is one of the most important and impressive accomplishments in American presidential history. TV news said the president’s tough trade talk would crash the economy in days; instead, the stock market hit record highs this very week, and blue-collar wages are rising faster than they have in nearly 60 years.

Under any other recent president, I am convinced the June Iran crisis would have ballooned into a full regime-change war, with far more money spent and many American lives lost. But under President Trump’s measured hand, America managed to strike a crippling blow to Iran’s nuclear program while suffering zero casualties and even bringing a ceasefire between Iran and Israel as part of the bargain.

Celebrating wins, big and small

Yet when I think about the events of the past six months, it’s not the big wins I think about the most — it’s the small ones. They’re the triumphs that don’t necessarily grab the largest headlines, but they show that this administration really is committed to systematically throwing out the suffocating groupthink and stagnation that have ruled in D.C. for decades.

Time and time again, this administration has been doing things that past Republicans could and should have done, yet inexplicably never did. For instance, back in 1981, the outgoing Jimmy Carter administration engineered a court ruling that abolished the federal government’s hugely successful hiring aptitude test because it was (you already knew this was coming) racist. Presidents Reagan, Bush 41, or Bush 43 could have fought to restore merit-based hiring. Yet they never did. Subsequently, over 45 years, our government went rotten as diversity, equity, and inclusion replaced merit.

Now, this administration is finally acting to bring back merit in government. Imagine that! From Harvard to Hennepin County, this administration has begun toppling the race- and sex-based discrimination that had taken root all over America in flagrant defiance of both our Constitution and historic American values. It is purging DEI commissars from federal agencies, imposing uniform standards on the military, and sending out warnings to the private sector as well. This isn’t superficial — it’s the destruction in detail of a rotten, anti-American ideology.

It would have been easy for Donald Trump to make a few speeches and sign a couple symbolic orders about “protecting women’s sports” — past Republican administrations would have settled for exactly that. But this administration has genuinely done the work to protect American children from the transgender mania, one of the great evils of our time.

Actually delivering on promises

Across America, health care providers are ending their involvement in child mutilation and similar treatments because of the dramatic increase in regulatory hostility from this administration. Children’s National Hospital in D.C., Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Stanford Medicine, and others have stopped providing surgeries or puberty blockers to minors in the face of this administration.

Where it matters most, the Trump administration has stepped up to save children from predators calling themselves “doctors.”

For my entire life, Republicans loved to make a show of complaining about America sending billions in aid to foreign countries. But they never stopped it — until Trump. He actually delivered by cutting USAID down to size and keeping more of America’s money in America. The same goes for defunding NPR, PBS, and Planned Parenthood: long years of talk, until the Trump administration fought to make it actually happen.

RELATED: In 6 months, Donald Trump has done the impossible

  Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images

It was obvious for almost 20 years that the TSA’s policy requiring passengers to remove their shoes before boarding a flight was a pointless bit of security theater, yet Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden all kept the policy in place anyway. This administration finally got rid of it.

While the Biden administration treated the cryptocurrency industry as a borderline criminal enterprise, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which positions America to lead this innovative industry.

The administration hasn’t just said the right things. It has done the right things, in detail, to ensure its promises are delivered at the micro level. The administration even made showerheads great again. And it’s that commitment to the small things and common sense that will pay dividends over the next three and a half years. Because an administration that cares about the details of governing will make all of America great too.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on RealClearPolitics.