If Trump can crush liberalism and force open the university doors to MAGA thinking than he will have changed America for generations

By Tom Arms

Cometh the hour. Cometh the university. To be more specific, that bastion of American liberalism—Harvard.

The defeated Democratic Party is worse than useless. The lawyers are frightened of threatened retribution. The media are curbing their criticisms in face of mounting law suits. The courts are hard at work, but they take time and the ultimate legal arbiter—the Supreme Court—has a decided conservative bent.

However, Trump may have met his match in Harvard University. In America money talks. Harvard has money. A $53.2 billion endowment fund. This money is a shield against all the arrows—mainly financial—that Trump is raining down on them.

The reason for the attacks on Harvard and other Ivy League universities is alleged anti-Semitism on campus. In reality it is because Harvard—and most of the other American universities– are citadels of open-minded, free-thinking, liberalism of the sort that has made America great. It represents everything that the current president opposes. As Trump publicly said: “I think Harvard is a disgrace”

The liberal elite of academia is a top target. If Trump can crush liberalism and force open the university doors to MAGA (Make America Great Again) thinking than he will have changed America for generations. Harvard is America’s top university. If he can succeed there the others will follow.

To that end, Trump’s administration has written to the university with a list of demands to be met with the implied threat of further action if they are not. They include subjecting the university to government oversight of Harvard’s admission and hiring policies. The university must provide personal details of all foreign students, monitor their activities and report on those activities to a federal authority. Anything that smacks of DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) programs must end along with any criticism of Israel which the Trump Administration has conflated with anti-Semitism.

And finally, Harvard University must agree to the government approving the university curriculum to ensure that faculty are promoting “American values.” Exactly who decides what those values are is needlessly left unspoken.

Harvard–in polite legal terms– has refused to comply.

Other Ivy League universities have not been so brave. Columbia, Yale and Princeton initially caved-in to Trump. But Harvard’s stand plus Trump’s decision to increase his demands have stiffened their spines and they have now joined Harvard in rejecting Trump’s demands and are coordinating a fight back.

The first law suits have been filed. Robert Hur, Harvard’s chief legal representative, has a strong legal case. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government cannot use federal benefits to coerce anyone or anything to surrender their constitutional rights. For example, in 1967 in Keyishian v. the New York Board of Regents, the justices struck down New York state laws requiring the state university employees to sign loyalty oaths.

In 1972, in Perry V Sinderman the court ruled that a university professor could not be denied a job for expressing his First Amendment rights to free speech.

Trump demands details on foreign students. In 1958 the state of Alabama wanted the membership list of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The court ruled that this violated the constitutional right to freedom of association and blocked it.

Perhaps of greater weight than Supreme Court rulings are the words of an alumnus of Yale Law School, Trump’s Vice President. In a November 20, 2022 interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, JD Vance said: “When the government can come after you because of what you think, or what you believe or what you do, we’ll no longer live in a free country.”

World Review

Trumpian chaos has dealt another blow to Ukraine.

The American president said that he would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours. He would bring peace to the region even before he was inaugurated.

Trump had a special bond with Vladimir Putin. The two men had chemistry and he could use it to the end war.

Zelensky meanwhile was a “dictator”. Ukraine started the war. Zelensky needed to sign over his country’s mineral rights to pay an inflated price for past help.

And then, Putin is acting unreasonably. He is sending in missiles and killing children when there is supposed to be a limited ceasefire. The Russian leader is stalling.

Then finally, on Friday—exactly one month after US and Russian teams gathered in Riyadh, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tells his European counterparts that Donald Trump has decided that talks are taking too long and he is considering pulling out of the negotiations that he initiated.

Ukraine is just another example of chaotically disjointed governance which is leaving the world’s leaders standing around scratching their heads in Trump’s destructive wake

Liberation Day, tariffs on everything and everyone except Russia, Belarus and North Korea. No, tariffs off. No, tariffs still on China. No, tariffs off some goods from China.

America is committed to NATO, says Rubio. No, NATO is full of freeloading Europeans and we should exit the alliance as quickly as possible, says Vice President JD Vance.

Trump’s anti-woke ideology harnessed to his 19th century economic policies, short-termism and demand for instant solutions to complex problems has created a crisis of confidence in America and its position in the world. It has also created a vacuum for China to step into.

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China traces its civilization back nearly 5,000 years. The United States will next year celebrate its 250th birthday.

Short term planning for China is a decade. Long term is… well, forever.

Short-term planning for the United States is until the next mid-term congressional elections held every two years. Long-term is the presidential elections every four years.

Governments in China stay in power until the “Mandate of Heaven” falls from their shoulders. American governments last four, maybe eight years if they are lucky.

Chinese people have no experience of democracy. Like their governments they live in the present and think not of tomorrow but of a future well beyond tomorrow. They are the standard bearers of an ancient well-ordered and established civilization

American people think of themselves as the standard bearers of democracy. Their society is thrusting, fast-moving, exciting and constantly changing at a sometimes exhausting pace.

Which of these two countries is best equipped to deal with the economic hardships that Donald Trump is inflicting on both of them?

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Britain is stuck between a rock and a geopolitical hard place. Since leaving the EU in 2016 it has suffered low growth, a drop in living standards and an even further drop in its international standing.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised economic growth. With growth will come higher tax revenues, lower borrowings and more money for defense and the NHS.

But from where will the growth come? Certainly not Europe with its ten percent tariff and mountains of bureaucratic red tape.

According to US Vice President the US cavalry is about to come galloping across the Atlantic to save Britain with a great trade deal. It seems that President Trump loves Britain. Loves the Royal Family and loves the idea of lifting Britain out of the economic doldrums.

Very tempting. And it is made more so by the existing “Special Relationship”-type connections and the Sir Keir’s belief that Britain can continue to carve out a role as bridge between Europe and America. And possibly—as Trump drives the US further and further into isolationism—between the world and America.

But there are problems with this strategy. To start with Trump is at best a one-term president (unless Trump can find a way around the constitutional prohibition of a third term) and the Democrats have shown little appetite for a US-UK trade agreement.

In fact, he may not make it to the end of his second term. In less than three months, President Donald J. Trump has set new records in plummeting approval ratings. According to an Economist/YouGov poll published this week, Trump’s approval rating has fallen to minus seven.

At the moment his slim majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives is preventing the Democrats from acting as an effective opposition. But if the latest polls are reflected in the mid-term elections in 19 months, Trump will find it impossible to continue to rule by decree. And, if he continues down the autocratic path, the Democrats may even win a two-thirds majority in the Senate and Trump would again face impeachment.

But there is another reason that a trade deal with the Trump Administration could be a Faustian Pact. It is that being friends with Donald Trump is more dangerous than being his enemy.

He has proven time and time again that he uses friendship as a lever to extract concessions. He does this simply by threatening to withdraw the advantages that his friendship has bestowed. Strike an advantageous deal with Donald Trump. Become dependent on that deal and Trump demands more and more and more and threatens to end the deal unless you bend the knee and deliver.

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Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and the author of “The Encyclopedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain

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