Veritas

 

In the year 50 B.T., I was awarded a seven-year scholarship to Harvard, one given, back then, to only fifty applicants per year. Had I done well enough, it included acceptance to grad school. To my grandmother’s chagrin, I turned it down. It wasn’t because of Ivy League stigma. It was because I was sure they’d made a mistake. Imposter syndrome, I guess. From the right, that stigma is gospel. I attach none to Harvard graduates, though, and not just because I married one.

Notwithstanding MAGAfied asperity, Harvard, like many other storied universities, has contributed immensely to our nation. If successful, Trump’s Id-iotic need to take them down would cloud the future of all of us. Turning away or deporting foreign students who come to partake of American scholarship already has. Whether they stay or return home, those students become positive representations of America, wherever they are. The US and the world need them. Typical of the current administration, shutting them out is short-sighted ignorance.

Trump, who lies about everything, denies being rejected by Harvard. Which means it’s true. Given daddy’s war bucks, a consequential qualification in decades past, that says a lot. In Trump, imposter isn’t a syndrome, it’s a definition. His native-born narcissism compels him to say he knows “more than anyone” about everything, voluminous evidence to the contrary. His birthright insecurity demands he “gets even” with any critic or institution that reveals the truth. That, he doesn’t deny. He’s proud of it. 

From this thin-skinned, partial president, having, as his niece tells us, “absolutely no redeeming qualities,” unchecked vengeance is ominous. Like his embarrassingly false Harvard accusations. Antisemitism is promoted there? From a guy who surrounds himself with de facto Nazis? Whose eponymous “university” scammed people out of millions? That guy wants to dictate how and what to teach in America, and who can do it.

For Stephen Miller and the Project 2025ers skulking around 1600, enfleshing their resentment of “the other” and fear of the educated, Trump’s attacks on universities are a perfect match. Aware that small-ell liberal education is a disinformation repellent, Republicans have pushed anti-intellectualism for decades. But it’s only with Trump that it’s come to reside so openly in the White House. Yet millions of voters observe Trump’s inability to carry an off-script thought to completion and consider it laudable.

The danger to democracy of Trump’s Projectile 2025 attacks on universities and public education can’t be overstated. That includes his whisperers’ desire to control what courses are taught, which words are acceptable, and to expunge books that refer in positive ways to anyone not white and Christian. Even in the Library of Congress. 

MAGA’s un-Christian priorities, manifested in their “Big Beautiful Budget Bill,” make their aims copiously clear. As everyone not sitting to the right of Congressional aisles knows, their tax cuts for wealthy donors, etched in reaganite, are “balanced” by cuts to every program that, for decades, has helped the less fortunate have a shot at dignity and overcoming poverty. Dismissed by Trumpists as moochers. But they’d in-your-face the Ten Commandments, to which none adhere, into all public buildings.

The BBBB not only doesn’t balance the budget, it REALLY doesn’t. insisting it doesn’t increase the national debt, Holy Mike Johnson, whom God has on speed-dial according to Mike, bears false witness. This, despite calculations by the Congressional Budget Office and conservative and liberal economists, all of whom predict increases in the trillions. Surely the Bible-brandishing Speaker knows Revelation 22:15. He must think doing what he considers God’s work excuses all transgressions. That the bill will lead to more hunger and disease, pollution and poverty, he must assume, is included in the absolution. If he were capable of it, he’d be ashamed.

But none of them feel shame. Shame at America’s foundational values and basic decency being discarded like Trump’s first two wives. Shame at defunding vital research, causing scientists to abandon their work, halting nascent discoveries. Shame at ceding intellectual leadership to geopolitical adversaries, at cutting disaster aid and weather warnings, because who cares? Shame at the emergence of a police state, in which ICE agents, enthusiastically cruel, wear masks to hide their identity, like criminals. In which elected members of the opposing party are arrested, their staff zip-tied “for their safety.” Shameless, America-rejecting MAGAs love what they see, incurious about what they don’t.

Trump’s vengeful attacks on Harvard are crimson lib-stick. Trump’s voters, made unable to look beyond their cultish glee, are blind to the dire implications for America. Which is precisely the point of his pre-dawn bleats and ill-conceived executive orders: feed them the phobic satisfaction they crave, while he enriches himself with paid-for pardons, bitcoin scams, and other shameless corruption. And while his gang of anti-democratic oligarchs, the ones actually in charge, destroy constitutional governance, brick by bricolage.

But why worry? As Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) reminded us, defending her party’s cruelty, “We’re all going to die.”