No Adults Allowed

Decoding the efforts to destroy American education.

Hey everybody! Welcome to Day 108 of this Trump presidency. Only a bit over 1350 left.

108 days. On every one of them the Trump admin has done its darnedest to destroy decade after decade of good public policy, wreck imperfect but extraordinarily functional federal institutions and thoroughly beclown the reputation of America across the globe. That he’s managed to fit in a ham-fisted bludgeoning of our economy with a Biggie side of empowering China and Russia says a lot about his very strong and very manly appetite for destruction.

Big Orange is headin’ down to Paradise City — armed with an automagical Diet Coke summoning device and all the Sharpies. And, unlike last time (as sad as those words are to ponder) there’s not a lot of the usual stumbling blocks standing in his way.

As dozens of journalists, pundits and other analysts have noted, what makes Trump 2.0 different from That Other Time is the relative absence of responsible supervision. NYT columnist Ezra Klein argued that the implicit message of selecting running-mate J.D. Vance was that there would be no adults allowed in the room this time around.

But Trump’s second term was never going to follow the same script because it has a completely different structure. This isn’t a coalition government; it’s a royal court. Trump is surrounded by courtiers who wield influence so long as they maintain his favor and not a moment longer. When is the last time he heard the word “no,” or was told, “I’m sorry, sir, you can’t”? In his first term, Trump either sought or was steered toward advisers and appointments that would reassure many of his doubters; in his second, he has prized loyalists who will do what they’re told and enforcers who will ensure that others fall in line as well.

Trump 2.0 is different because there’s now a NO PARENTS ALLOWED sign on the door of his Oval Office clubhouse.

That Trump prizes loyalty and devotion is no news. It is his raison d’être, both substantive and functional; adulation, devotion and praise are what he uses to fill the infinite emptiness inside him and loyalty is the currency which can keep that psychic economy safe, as every mobster or wannabe-Caesar knows. It’s covered in the first week of Autocracy 101: Bullying For Beginners, right after the reading of the syllabus.

Not that Trump has much use for the classroom. His disdain for personal learning or study is well-reported. He does not read any of the information regularly prepared for presidents, even though those daily packets contain some of the finest (and most expensive) intel, research and analysis on the planet, and resists all but the most remedial, dumbed-down, monosyllabic briefings. The guy is no thinker and staunchly refuses to be taught — yet he has shown that he values the status conferred by education. Trump is quick to mention that he attended an Ivy League school (insofar as the coursework for an MBA at Penn’s Wharton School counts) and loves to exalt the tenure of his uncle, a professor at MIT, for example, even sometimes hinting clumsily that he himself is so smart because of that genetic relationship.

What can be said of Trump’s individual relationship to education cannot be said, however, for his political relationship to education. The latter relationship mirrors the beliefs, goals and resentments held by Trump loyalists, from the courtiers surrounding him to the think tanks which retcon Trumpism into semi-intellectual parlance to the far reaches of the MAGA base. Theirs is a much darker, more cynical and bellicose view of education, a view with a history of questing for one Holy Grail in particular — to invert the relationship between culture and power.

If you’ve kept up with right-populism’s very public siege on education lately, you’ll have heard about rumbles with the Ivy League, Harvard in particular, as well as widespread funding cuts to every level of education nationwide. The ostensible justifications always involve needed austerity, DEI, anti-semitism, hand-wringing about free speech, and highly coded, buzzy jargon like “ideological capture” and its proposed remedy “viewpoint diversity”.

Unfortunately, you don’t even have to watch Fox News or otherwise dip your toes into the porcine waste lagoons which constitute right-wing media to hear phrases like “freedom from ideological bias” and “viewpoint diversity”. If you were a reader of many traditional center/center-left publications over the last decade — outlets like the New York Times and The Atlantic, for example — then you probably plowed through rows and rows of well-fertilized little what cancel culture is doing to our colleges think-pieces. You likely even stumbled upon the big, bad scarecrow in the field, the so-called “Harper’s letter”, a petty flood of worrisome flop-sweat spilled to wash away “identity politics” lest ideology drown free speech in higher education. As if. Like nearly every pearl-clutching ponder-fest about “cancel culture”, the Harper’s signatories seem oblivious to the reality that culture is, and always has been, firmly in the cancellation business. It’s one of the ways culture gets its work done, via social censure and, yes, shame — the tools of its trade. Hopefully, now that those free-speech warriors, of both center-right and center-left stripes, get a front row seat to what happens when its no longer the depersonalized modulations of culture doing the cancelling but Big, Beautiful Government, they’ll finally understand the difference between cultural censure and it’s larger, uglier acquaintance, censorship. They’ll realize, one might hope, why only the latter manages to show up in the Constitution. (Pro-tip: it’s because it’s the one which requires an inherent and constitutive monopoly on violence.) But I won’t be putting money on it over at the prediction markets.

For a quick primer on the Trump regime’s various rationalizations for torturing American pedagogy, I recommend having a look at the letter sent Monday to Harvard University President Alan Garber. It served as a warning that there would be no further federal GRANTS (yeah, it’s all-caps in the letter) coming to Harvard, and is signed by Linda McMahon, former CEO of pro-wrestling’s WWE and current US Secretary of Education (or Secretary of What’s Left Of It, as Trump has directed McMahon to erase the existence of her own department). Seriously, give it a read. It is a certifiably wild ride.

As epistle, it’s a showcase-showdown of hallucinatory polemic, molded in the style of a Truth Social post (“why is there so much HATE?”), chock full of threats and topped off with a saccharine Thank you for your attention in this matter! that would make Headmistress Dolores Umbridge positively squeal in Pink Lady delight.

The wise, effervescent, and totally buff Tressie McMillan Cottom nailed McMahon’s tone and tenor in a post on Bluesky:

You know those letters that serial killers paste from newspaper clippings? Same energy.

The lexicon of fascism is so wild.

Not that the letter isn’t downright illuminating, in its own way. Honestly, it’s as solid an artifact of the MAGA-verse’s try-hard sycophancy as one is likely to see outside of videos from Trump’s North Korean-styled cabinet meetings (which are nothing short of freakish). McMahon linguistically massages the President by mimicking his, erm, “style” so efficiently that the document could easily be mistaken for a dictation or the third draft of some late-night passion thumbed onto Trump’s phone, complete with capitalized NOUNS, weird and simplistic adverbs (“strongly left-leaning Obama appointee”), and Trumpy hyperbolics (Bill deBlasio and Lori Lightfoot are “failed Mayors” and “the worst mayors ever”). Of course, that it has something vaguely akin to an argumentative structure and an assemblage of pseudo-evidentiary points marks it as firmly outside of Trump’s capabilities. Nevertheless, it serves as something like a chain of reasoning, one used to justify Executive Branch interference in a realm where it truly does not belong.

Additionally, the letter seems to propose a transaction. A deal. Trump, as we constantly hear, is an artist when it comes to those. If Harvard — or by extension Columbia or big law firms or China — will just accede to the terms of the deal then the lost funding, or trade or freedom or whatever, will be restored. But this is always complete hogwash. If you’re Columbia University or one of the big white-shoe law firms which hurried to bend the knee to the administration’s demands, you’re already in the finding out phase of FAFO. You can’t bend the knee low enough, no matter the terms of the deal.

And that’s because the deal isn’t just about DEI or anti-semitism or meritocracy. It’s about power (the foundation of all such protection rackets), and, ultimately, gaining enough of it to force culture to… well, quit being culture.

No don’t get me wrong, right-populism does, bless its shriveled little heart, honestly loathe and despise DEI initiatives. MAGA is thoroughly, deeply, and despicably racist. And misogynistic. And transphobic. The regime is deporting folks because they absolutely believe that people of color are infectious vermin and their self-professed anti-anti-semitism is exactly as pro-Jew as Richard Spencer. Them’s the facts. But every time MAGA justifies some destructive act by reference to DEI, at least two masters are being served. One is the white, patriarchal, cisgendered agenda. The other is the destruction itself.

The prosecution of these mutual goals is particularly true within the historical assault upon American education. At every level, education has been a target of conservative resentment for a century or more and with colleges and universities being a particular focus of attacks from the right since McCarthyism in the 1950s. Those attacks were focused by the emergence of the New Left a half century ago. “During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s,” a report from the AAUP begins…

…right-wing philanthropists poured millions of dollars into demonizing higher education as infested by “political correctness” whose advocates supposedly purveyed a dogmatic brand of left-wing identity politics while suppressing free speech and conservative discourse on their campuses. Not surprisingly, that widely disseminated portrayal of a narrow-minded academic elite—plus the rising cost of a college education—undermined the popularity and prestige of the academy. Accordingly, when the Republican Party signed onto the conservative network’s program and red state legislatures promoted the repressive measures now threatening the university, the nation’s increasingly fragmented and demoralized faculties seemed unable to mount an effective response.

The demoralization of faculty remains a primary tactic in the much more modern and sophisticated war being fought in the 21st century by think tanks and the dark money elites behind them. University administrations get the same treatment — one merely needs to think of the sickening glee with which Elise Stefanik, Bill Ackman, and Christopher Rufo celebrated having deposed Harvard President Claudine Gay. Then, the demoralization of the student body is served by eliminating diversity initiatives, funding cuts, elimination of departments, vilification of entire fields of study, and the wildly disproportionate backlash against political activity on college campuses, all coupled with the nationwide revocation of student visas and subsequent climate of fear among international students created by Marco Rubio.

There is no part of American education safe from these varied attacks, from every side. Every imaginable weapon — loaded with every possible ammunition — is grabbed up by the right and put to use with the goal of burning the American Schoolhouse to ashes.

It’s hard to not to conclude, after the recent Trump campaign and these last 100 days, that burning it all down is now the goal. Micah Loewinger at WNYC’s excellent On The Media, noted (emphasis mine):

This year, Republicans campaigned against universities. It is a big change. They used to talk about making college more accessible. Now they’re saying college itself is bad.

There’s no doubt that in recent years conservatives have gotten far more explicit about their estimation of higher education. In a now infamous speech entitled “The Universities Are The Enemy”, delivered to the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, then Senate candidate J.D. Vance said,

So much of what we want to accomplish, so much of what we want to do in this movement, in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity…

And,

…if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

And,

And if you ask yourself why have we consented to this, why have we accepted a world in which the universities — which by the way are not exactly politically sympathetic with any of the people in this room — why have we done that?

This speech, as I mentioned, is now fairly well known, widely covered, and pops up in plenty of current discussions regarding education, but it still pummels me on every reading, stopping my breath for a moment. It’s not the most bananapants among the many right-wing arguments against higher ed — trust me, there’s some loopy, hairy stuff out there that will turn your hair funny colors.

And, to be sure, part of it’s infamy comes solely from it’s conclusion, in which Vance joins in with that niche conservative subculture which hopes to replace Ronald Reagan with Richard Nixon as the modern GOP’s most worshipped golden calf. What it’s got, however, is a certain combination of directness, venom and suave ferocity which, like a car accident or horrible public tragedy, grabs your attention and makes it hard to look away, even as it turns your stomach.

Like similar attacks on education from the anti-pluralist, illiberal right, Vance’s speech goes on to catalog the usual fevered, clammy justifications for why universities must be “gone through” (I imagine with something very long and very pointy). Vance directly names feminism, environmentalism, and critical race theory (to Vance it is indistinguishable from DEI), while sprinkling the fairy dust of anecdotal gossip that often serves as evidence in fascist reveries. And, just as often, that “evidence” bears out popular observations that the right gets eternal forgiveness for it’s gaffes and missteps, while any institution, idea or person with the barest hint of left-coding must be perpetually perfect to survive media scrutiny

He argues not only that college makes students soft but that campuses train students to hate those Americans “working with their hands”. To possess a degree means that you believe America, a nation built solely by men says Vance, is “an evil and terrible place”.

Professors are always only progressives, teaching nothing but progressivism to a captive audience of innocent children with no agency, each of whom have little choice but to hate America and freedom and white men. All this evil progressivism, all this so-called education, all these diplomas, according to Vance, boils down to two outcomes.

The first is “to rob the American people blind”. Sigh.

The second, “to tell them to shut the hell up about it if they dare complain.”

An education might allow you to say “shut it” to someone spouting despicable ideas. A great teacher in 7th grade or an inspirational high school English teacher might give you the tools to inform a eugenicist about the several ways they can get bent. Being inspired by a college mentor could lead to you standing in front of an ICE agent who is dragging a cancer-ridden, brown-skinned toddler into a waiting van and saying “No!”. A diploma, heaven forfend, might give that “No!” some weight, some gravitas.

The fascist fear of the diploma becomes ever more clear as Vance moves into a section drubbing one of MAGA’s very favorite objects of disdain, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But you ask yourself what is the claim of authority that Anthony Fauci has. We didn’t elect him. Of course, no person in here voted for Anthony Fauci. We didn’t do anything to make him the lord over our entire economy, and over our entire social lives. I saw recently that he said that if you want to hang out with your family over Christmas, two years after the beginning of the pandemic, you should make you and your children wear masks. We didn’t – no person in this room, no person in our country – gave Anthony Fauci this authority.

And here’s the kicker:

Where does their authority come from? It comes from the piece of paper that hangs up in the office walls of every single one of them – the university diploma. And we subsidize, we support, and in our own ways all of us reinforce the power of universities to control our lives and control how we live them.

Diplomas control their lives. Theirs. “Education” prevents anti-pluralist thinkers from being able to fully actualize their anti-pluralist plans. That’s why schools and schooling must be controlled. That’s why they must burn down “the colleges and the universities that make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.”

From a simplistic perspective, it’s no wonder that Vance and the Trump administration started their attacks with Columbia, Harvard and similar institutions which they consider representative of the “elite”. Especially in Trump’s mind, those diplomas carry an excess of status, weight, and authority. (They unequivocally should not — but that’s a big topic for another time.) But those big media attacks on elite institutions are a small part of the wide-ranging damage already actualized by Trump 2.0 in just over 100 days. The effects of DOGE firings and funding freezes, the dismantling of the Department of Education, the erasure of school food programs, the loss of Head Start — the list goes on for pages — all of these are engineered to hollow out, nullify, and eventually eliminate the education of the American public.

Why? Because, starting in infancy, education is the very first and ultimately most powerful process in the creation of the adults in the room - the citizens who have learned that racism is structural, who understand that gender is fluid, and who have demanded that every single person will reckon with consent. Whether we learn these things in Pre-K or a doctoral program is of no consequence.

Why do so many conservatives, racists, and far-right fundamentalists get into homeschooling? Because they don’t want their kids to become the grownups - the voters — caregivers and cotton farmers and college professors — who have learned that pluralism means living and prospering together and that when our neighbors win, we win, too. It is the grownups out there who terrify would-be authoritarians because, wherever or whenever we learn it, we embody the power to say no to abusers of power and to the grotesqueries of autocracy.

Why does the right vilify school teachers and fight so hard to pay them so little? Why do they seek to transfer funding for our public schools to private and religious schools? Why does J.D. Vance, at the end of his speech, quote the private “Watergate tapes” recording of Richard Nixon wildly claiming that “Professors are the enemy”?

According to Hilary Burns, education reporter at The Boston Globe:

I asked a professor, a CUNY professor, Benjamin Hett, why is it that universities are among the first targets for authoritarian leaders and his answer was quite simple. He said, “Because professors tend to tell them they’re wrong. Who likes that?

That this is what onboards Trump, someone who has been somewhat willing to value education instrumentally (that is, he has historically considered “smart people” useful to him, at minimum), into the greater conservative war on education, is a notion I find somewhat compelling. Not that it matters. The GOP assault on higher education is now our collective nationwide reality. The battle is happening now — visible in the brainless buzz sawing of DOGE, in Trump’s executive orders which, among many other things, foolishly promise to mess about with college accreditations, and in state legislatures’ attempts to tighten up their Viktor Orban game.

We are in an age of “cognitively irresponsible leaders”. That’s what rhetorician Jen Mercieca calls authoritarian figures like Trump and Orban.

They don’t want to be held accountable for their words and actions. They don’t want to have to persuade the nation to accept or adopt their policies. They really just want to rule by dictate. They want to make a policy, and when we ask why, they want to say, ‘Because I said so.’

They don’t enjoy how they feel when the adults in the room tell them they’re wrong.

So whaddya say we keep saying it?

I’m Milo Baynes. Thanks for trusting me with your time.

@milobaynes.bsky.social