346 - The Present Apocalypse: How to Destroy the Republic and Benefit Putin and Xi

When China reneged on its promise to Great Britain to enshrine home rule in Hong Kong, it soon grabbed protesters at night and packed them off to hidden detention facilities before holding a few show trials with predetermined long-term sentencing outcomes. China persecuted publishers of one-time independent newspapers, denied free speech to university faculty, and gave orders to judges. It threw Uyghur Muslims into "re-education" camps, with forced labor requirements, when China wanted to make sure that Han Chinese language and culture would remain dominant in the giant Xianjing region. Tibetans are prevented forcibly from practicing Buddhism and dissent nowhere in China is permitted.

When the Trump administration kidnaps green carded and student visa holders off American streets and spirits them in the dead of night to distant holding centers inaccessible to spouses and lawyers, and even sends judicially protected persons to notorious prisons in El Salvador, it is clear that rights to due process are being violated, callously, and that Washington is behaving more and more like Beijing at its most vindictive.

Copying President Xi Jinping's methods of keeping the state and communism ascendant in Hong Kong and China hardly makes our United States stronger or more able to win the hearts and minds of the world. Instead, our once robust moral posture withers, and global respect vanishes. Our ability to persuade nations across to globe to cooperate with us in making the world a better, safer, and more prosperous planet decays, and quickly.

The U. S. can hardly expect to keep China from invading Taiwan and taking forcible control of the South China Sea and its shoals and surroundings if we behave like any other tyrannical state that lacks a moral center. Nor can we bring Putin to the peace table regarding Ukraine if we start to use his own internal methods of jailing protesters without even a nod to rights protected by our hallowed Constitution.

Cracking down on the best regarded American universities, and stripping them of their federal funding, is also reminiscent of the denial of academic freedom within Russia and China. Trump wants only "patriotic" history. Stalin demanded the writing of an official, sanitized, history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the late 1930s (while purging "intellectuals" who voiced dissent and tried to be "independent"). Trump, unwittingly (who knows?) parroting Stalin and Putin, calls independent American commentators and thinkers "lunatics," labels all opposition to his authoritarianism as "left wing," and is hell-bent on wreaking revenge on critics and those bureaucrats who a single unhinged conspiracy theorist tells him (without a smidgen of hard evidence) are disloyal to him personally. They are loyal to their constitutional oath and concerned to uplift America, but Trump listens to hearsay and fires them without cause and without due process.) Firing Saturday our National Security Agency and Cybersecurity chief for alleged disloyalty only benefits Putin and Xi.

Mao did immense damage to Chinese and China when he wreaked untold havoc and destruction during the so- called cultural revolution. Mao sent his youthful adjuncts to eliminate anyone who could think or express an opinion. He wrecked universities and dumbed down an entire generation. Is this what Trump wants and is this what we want? Where are the contrary voices in Congress and the (social) media?

It is in that despicable spirit that Trump has managed to shutter or cripple a collection of private institutions in Washington that derive only some of their funds from the U.S. treasury and are otherwise independent, free-standing, Congressionally chartered knowledge accumulating bodies that now offend Trump and/or his culture warriors. Foremost is the venerable Smithsonian Institution, home of six important museums such as the National Museum of Natural History. Equally impressive in their intellectual and policy arenas are the U. S. Institute of Peace and the very benign Woodrow Wilson Center of International Scholarship. (I was a Woodrow Wilson fellow, writing a book, a decade ago.) None, nor the equally threatened Institute of Museum and Library Services (with a mere thirty employees) are anything but well-regarded organizations with a long list of accomplishments that make the world, and these United States, richer in achievement and in analysis. USAID was also destroyed; I have already written in this space about that foolish and Russia/China favorable maneuver. Grants to state humanities council provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, where I was once on the Board of Directors, have been rescinded -- along with much else. Three USAID employees helping on the ground with the rescue efforts in Myanmar were summarily fired Saturday by email, leaving no American help for the devastated nation.

Each of these attacks on American institutions (and the Department of Education) weakens America and Americans in the titanic struggle (that is not hyperbole) between evil and good, between freedom and tyranny, and between human dignity and dictatorial repression that has in this decade become fundamental to the future of our world. The good guys won that battle in World War II. And we outlasted Mao and Stalin et al during the Cold War. But peace and prosperity in the world began to crumble when Xi took charge in China and Putin invaded first Georgia, then Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and finally the full body of Ukraine. Now everything that Trump does daily undercuts our ability to present the United States as a continuing moral force, as an able and intelligent democratic counterpoise to dictatorship and despotism, and as a repository of tolerance, sense, and sensibility. He is weakening the armed forces, too.

The tariffs, about which I have recently written in this space, are ruinous of global comity and prosperity. They betray profound stupidity, deep ignorance, and a complete absence of compassion and care for the citizens of the world. They are hardly a winning card trick (using Trump's language). Nor do they help sustain nations' faith in our trust or our good policy making sense. Instead, everyone can see that they are entirely retributive. Trump bleats about the U.S. being ripped off by other countries. But that claim is wrong, and an obviously false place from which to start trying to make America great. As I wrote, everything is about Trump's ego and his need to demonstrate personal power.

The same is sadly true with respect to universities, small and large institutions like the Smithsonian, and the now ongoing crusade against diversity, equity, inclusion (an effort, Trump declares, to prevent whites from being bothered by a "hostile environment")! Trump also said that he wanted to "celebrate true American history...instead of corrupting it in the name of left-wing ideology" -- hardly what the Smithsonian and its many museums have ever commemorated.

Trump daily echoes the notorious Project 2025: “America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” Project 2025’s authors are determined “to put a spike through the heart of woke,” and to “retake control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian.” This is true Soviet stuff, very Stalinist and enormously erroneous. To Trump, the director of the Smithsonian responded that he and the Smithsonian remained steadfast "to telling the multifaceted stories of this country's extraordinary heritage." Amen.

Likewise, saying that Trumpers are wholly interested in clearing antisemitism out of universities, and protecting the 2 percent of Americans who are Jews, is misleading, cynical, and hypocritical. As Boston Globe stellar columnist Yvonne Abraham began a piece last week, "Don't be fooled...The Trump administration could not give a rat's behind about antisemitism. They're just using it as a pretext to stifle dissent and dismantle colleges they see as hostile to their worldview." Several New York rabbis echoed her words, too.

This is exactly right. Notwithstanding that the attacks on our major research universities and a bunch of solely undergraduate colleges will reduce America's global lead in science and technology, end finding cures for deadly diseases, and emasculate the advantages we have long had over China and Russia in innovation and problem-solving, Trump seems intent on winning a culture conflict that only he and some acolytes really imagine is important. His people have even scrapped a $3 million Homeland Security-funded University of Maryland national database tracking domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and school shootings. It no longer "effectuates Department priorities!!" Moreover, the attempt to cripple the giant $47 billion National Institutes of Health, the world's leading public funder of biomedical research, is stupendous in its folly.

Trump wants to show who is boss and employs supposed culture differences as a mobilizing excuse. Hence the frog marching of dedicated leaders out of so many minor and major Washington entities, the attempt to reprogram the Kennedy Center, and the effort to move DEI out of schools and the Smithsonian. Do we want our children and grandchildren to grow up in an atmosphere that "normalizes blatant discrimination, distrust, and a lack of empathy that can only perpetuate inhumane acts?"

Meanwhile, particularly in academic science and technology, and then in diplomacy and soft power, the U. S. disarms obsessively in the face of Russian and Chinese ambition and firepower. For whom is our president really working?

Subscribers: Temporary family needs (not Trump exhaustion) will keep me from Substack writing until next week. But my columns will return!