By Sid Schwab / Herald Columnist
In the year 50 B.T. , I was offered a seven-year scholarship to Harvard, one given, back then, to only 50 applicants per year (Harvard Crimson: tinyurl.com/HNS4u). Had I done well enough, it included acceptance to grad school. I turned it down. It wasn’t because of “elite college” stigma. It was because I was sure they’d made a mistake, figured I’d flunk out (#imposter syndrome). From the right, that stigma is gospel. I attach none to Harvard graduates, though, and not just because I married one.
Notwithstanding MAGAfied nay-saying, Harvard, like most enlightened 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. Scaring away or deporting foreign students who long to partake of American scholarship already has. Whether they stay or return home, those students become representatives of America, wherever they are. The U.S. and the world needs them. Shutting them out is short-sighted but typical stupidity.
Donald Trump, who lies about everything, denies he applied to Harvard and was rejected. 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 a definition. His native-born narcissism tells him he knows “more than anyone” about everything, undeniable evidence to the contrary. His birthright insecurity demands he “gets even” with any critic or institution that tells the truth. That, he doesn’t deny. He’s proud of it (YouTube: tinyurl.com/even2u).
In this thin-skinned, partial president having, as his niece tells us, “absolutely no redeeming qualities,” unchecked vengeance is catastrophic. 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. With MAGAs, it’s A-OK.
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-l liberal education repels Foxoid disinformation, 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 a thought to completion and consider it laudable.
The danger to democracy of Trump’s Projectile 2025 attacks on education can’t be overstated. That includes his 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, it appears, in the Library of Congress (Seattle Times: tinyurl.com/noLOC4u).
The Republican agenda would relegate all others while in-your-facing the Ten Commandments, in which none of them believes, in public buildings. Their priorities, manifested in their “Big Beautiful Bill,” make their unchristian aims abundantly 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 advancement. Dismissed, by Trumpists, as moochers.
The bill not only doesn’t balance the budget, it really doesn’t. Holy Mike Johnson, whom God has on speed-dial, bore false witness, insisting it doesn’t increase the national debt (tinyurl.com/holylie2u). This, despite calculations by the Congressional Budget Office and several conservative and liberal economists, all of whom predict addition to the debt in the trillions. A beatific Bible brandisher, surely Mike knows Revelation 22:15 (KJV: tinyurl.com/22154u). He must think doing what he considers God’s work excuses all transgressions. That the bill will lead to more hunger, 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, Trump voters included, feel shame. Shame at American values and basic decency being discarded like Trump’s first two wives. Shame at defunding vital research, causing scientists to abandon their work (Time: tinyurl.com/nomorescience). Shame at ceding intellectual leadership to geopolitical adversaries, at cutting disaster aid and weather warnings. Shame at the emergence of a police state, in which ICE agents, enthusiastically cruel, wear masks to hide their identities, like criminals. In which elected members of the opposing party are arrested, their staff handcuffed “for their safety.” America-rejecting MAGAs love what they see, incurious about what they don’t.
Trump’s vengeful attacks on Harvard are crimson lib-stick. The MAGAfied, 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 his voters the phobic satisfaction they crave, while he enriches himself with paid-for pardons, bitcoin scams, and other shameless corruption. And while his gang of oligarchs, the ones actually in charge, destroy democratic governance, brick by bricolage.
But why worry? As Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, reminded us, defending her party’s cruelty, “We’re all going to die” (Pinterest: tinyurl.com/no2worry).
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
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