The Trump administration’s decision to end the political persecution of a South Dakota farming and ranching family didn’t receive major attention. So far, it isn’t a top story for news sites and shows amid a busy week of conversation around President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in his second term.
It should be.
When Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem held a joint press conference Wednesday morning to announce the cessation of federal prosecution against two ranchers whose lives were turned upside down by the Biden administration, it wasn’t a one-off event. It was yet another clear example of the Trump team’s devotion to reversing former President Joe Biden’s bureaucratic war against American families.
Charles and Heather Maude, a small, fifth-generation farming and ranching family near Pennington County in South Dakota, were prosecuted by the Biden administration via the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in 2024. Both parents were charged separately, facing $250,000 fines and up to 10 years in prison each, for allowing their cattle to graze on 25 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.
The Maudes, whose family has owned their farm for five generations, disputed the fence line that marked the edge of their property with the grasslands, and claimed the U.S. Forest Service had originally set up an informal agreement Biden’s administration later violated.
What would normally be a small civil dispute was used by Biden’s Forest Service to severely prosecute the Maudes for theft and purloining. Charles Maude also told The Daily Signal that government officials advised them to find separate living arrangements for their children in the likely event that both parents were locked up for a decade.
Rollins, Noem, and several state and congressional officials commended the Maudes, and announced new efforts by the Trump administration to not only review new disputes and concerns of bureaucratic overreach via a new online portal but vowed to review older government decisions against American farmers and landowners.
“The prosecution of the Maudes is now over. They will not be driven from their homes, they will not be failed, they will not be fined and their children will grow up with a mother and a father that they love and who love them,” Rollins said. “We are ending regulation through prosecution.”
While legacy media outlets have made much ado about group chat messages and Trump 2028 T-shirts, coverage of the Trump administration’s consistent focus on rectifying the damage done to American families by the jackboot of unfettered bureaucracy has been sparse to nonexistent.
To mothers and fathers in Middle America, new measures put in place to keep faceless monstrosities from stripping them of their children and family farm are worth far more than the squabbling of coastal ambulance chasers writing their 15th article about which color suit Trump wore to Pope Francis’ funeral.
That hasn’t stopped ankle-biting legacy media outlets from focusing on narratives like “millions of Americans” regret voting for Trump, suggesting that an unsteady stock market has irrevocably turned the tides.
I asked Charles Maude if he regretted his vote for Trump. After all, a farmer with less than a hundred head of cattle and no more than two dozen sows would feel the pressures of an unstable market. Unsurprising to those of us outside the Beltway, though, he told me, “Not a bit. I just wish he would have had eight years before, continuous, I think he could have gotten a few more issues taken care of for the American farmer.”
Herein lies the not-so-secret brilliance of the second Trump administration: Every Cabinet official is investing all of their efforts in addressing decades of cultural, economic, and policy failures caused by a technocracy more enamored with their own portfolios and a pimple-faced lobbyist intern than parents, farmers, teachers, and all kinds of citizens from flyover states who called or wrote to ask for help or answers—only to be ignored entirely.
Noem addressed this directly in the press conference:
I have letters in my Department of Homeland Security from senators, from congressmen, from people that didn’t get responded to for four years. Not even a response of a form letter was sent back to them answering their questions or bringing any transparency to government.
The astute of you, by which I mean those above a third-grade reading level, will recognize this brilliance isn’t 4D chess. It’s not a “36 steps ahead strategy,” nor built on trolling the media (though I’m particularly fond of that one). It doesn’t need to be.
I have always been fond of servant leadership. Coach John Wooden of UCLA was found most mornings sweeping his own basketball court floor. I’ve had the honor of personally witnessing a few of Trump’s secretaries (Noem, Rollins, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio), direct their staff to serve “everyday people” first, even if it leaves angry, screeching representatives like Maxine Waters to yell outside.
After being treated with disdain and dismissal by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s staff during the Biden years, to call this era refreshing would be a severe understatement.
I had the privilege of covering a new initiative by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office to provide an online portal for Hoosier parents to share concerns about discriminatory initiatives in public schools. This idea has been wisely taken up by the current Department of Education, and now Rollins has announced a new portal to give American farmers, ranchers, florists, and gardeners an opportunity to share concerns directly.
As a small-town Hoosier, I suspect many might discount the impact of attending a USDA press conference to announce federal charges dropped for a small South Dakota family. A dispute between the Forest Service and a small farm—who cares? Many of my colleagues attend several press conferences each week, and for them, this presser might not look like much. For me, this was an eye-opening insight into the tangible value of servant leadership-minded, transparent, and severely limited executive agencies.
The American dream is built on much more than foreign policy and the rise and fall of the stock market.
While Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez preach about “fighting the oligarchy,” their speeches contain little about the struggles Americans have faced under the tyranny of bureaucrats Democrats claim are infallible and seek to make irremovable. Christian businesses targeted by the IRS, parents put on watch lists for attending school board meetings, and the exclusion of aid to conservative hurricane survivors by Federal Emergency Management Agency agents are not crimes by elected officials—but the very unelected nobles our nation was set to be a bulwark against.
Americans are exhausted with Ivy League academics in cushy jobs lording over them via regulatory fiat—and this administration has done more in 100 days than any in history to fix it.
