Trump Assault on Core American Values Targets Leading Universities
By Tom Kagy | 15 Apr, 2025

A wanna-be totalitarian regime flips Hitler's scapegoating of Jews on its head as the perfect guise for assaulting core American values at leading universities.

Three months into Donald Trump's second term, the MAGA agenda has become clear: make America open season for old-school authoritarianism, racism, jingoism, xenophobia and isolationism — precisely the evils against which the United States of America was conceived under the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — then rejected through six generations of bloody sacrifice.

The assault is being kicked off with extortionate demands against America's great universities to conform to the MAGA agenda or lose longstanding federal funding for research projects.  The regime's demands include ending diversity and renouncing the constitutional rights to free speech and association on their campuses.  

This authoritarian regime seeks to pull off this anti-Constitutional coup under the derisible guise of fighting antisemitism.

The "antisemitism" presumably refers to student protests against the inhumane treatment and killing of innocent Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military.  That's like saying that the WTO is engaging in anti-Americanism by insisting that the US observe the laws to which it's a signatory (and which it has recently violated "bigtime" with Trump's tariffs).

To its credit Harvard rejected the Trump regime's demand despite the threat of withholding $2.2 billion federal funding it had expected to receive.  Harvard chose to stick with its DEI programs and continue to let its students exercise their constitutional right to free speech in the form of protests.  It was also implicitly rejecting the regime's demand to cooperate in ferreting out foreign student protestors.

“We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement,” reads the statement issued by Harvard President Alan M. Garber. “The University will not surrender its independence or its constitutional rights.”

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber added.

Instead the Harvard chapter of the Association of University Professors filed suit seeking an order preventing the Trump regime from using the threat of pulling federal funding to impose its authoritarian agenda.  This prompted the frustrated Trump regime to threaten to tax Harvard as a political entity!

The regime has already cut $400 million in funding for Columbia University, pressuring it into taking steps to comply with the regime's demands.  Meanwhile other universities including Princeton and Cornell have expressed resistance to the regime's demands.

The regime seems to be targeting universities as bastions of the values that stand in the way of its apparent aim of imposing totalitarian control over the activities and even the thought processes of the American people. 

But Trump hasn't been shy about making known his intention to become emperor.  In a recent executive order he has gone as far as to declare any act of protest showing opposition to him or his policies subversion warranting deportation or prosecution.  This amounts to an atrocious disregard of the most basic and important constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech and association by the very person sworn to uphold the Constitution!

Trump's subversive abuse of power extends beyond freedom of speech and association to seeking to reverse the singularly American values of tolerance and equality by intimidating universities and businesses into renouncing the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies that had been implemented in an effort at advancing the cause of racial tolerance and equality in the wake of brutal racism by members of the Milwaukee police department.

The regime seems to target DEI as a threat to the rights of White males without college degrees who disproportionately support Trump.  The idea that society is served by efforts to counter the effect of the prejudices that persist is offensive to a regime that would much rather scapegoat people who are different as the cause of the ills of American society.  This xenophobic and un-American perspective in a nation founded by immigrants and built by immigrant sweat and blood is evidenced by the regime's aggressive deportation campaign which often doesn't discriminate between law-abiding and criminal migrants, or even between legal residents or even naturalized citizens and undocumented migrants!

Of course citing imagined wrongs committed by scapegoated "outsiders" was the technique favored by Hitler as he began tightening his totalitarian grip on Germany.  Hitler's rise to absolute power began by depicting the Nazi party as the savior of Germans from evils like Jewish corruption, domination of big money, burdensome reparation payments, usury, war guilt, inflation, unemployment, threats of rape (presumably by Jews) — in short, everything that worried the uneducated working-class.

And of course as the Nazis gained actual power the slogans became more pointedly racist, declaring, "Jews are our misfortune", then ultimately seeking a "final solution", i.e., the extermination of six million Jews.  

So far the Trump regime hasn't sought to exterminate migrants or launch attacks on foreign nations that he scapegoats for America's crime and drug problems or its national budget deficit.  But he's already doing what he sees as the next best thing: sending migrants back to their home countries and imposing punitive tariffs on trading partners.

But the regime is young, and Trump has begun showing defiance to judicial orders, even one from the Supreme Court which recently ruled 9-0 requiring the regime to facilitate bringing back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland migrant family man mistakenly sent to a Salvadorian mega-prison for hardened criminals.  Such defiance of the judicial branch by a President is clearly a violation of Constitutional separation of powers which, in itself, would be grounds for impeachment.

But Trump's violation of deeply-held American values extends further.  On Friday he accorded a warm reception to El Salvador's ruthless dictator Nayib Bukele during which the two men bonded over their mutual refusal to do anything to facilitate Garcia's return to the US.  Together with his expressed admiration for Russian president Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Trump has amply demonstrated his own aspiration to become an American dictator, betraying yet another cherished American value which rejects the concept of kings.

Given the pace at which Trump has been progressing toward a posture of unchecked power and authority, Americans have reason to be concerned that they too could soon awake to find themselves subjects of a totalitarian regime like Russians and North Koreans.