Trump threatens new 'Dark Age' with policy of 'deliberate destruction': analysis

President Donald Trump's administration is pushing a "deliberate destruction of education, science, and history," wrote Adam Serwer in a scathing analysis for The Atlantic published on Tuesday — and it recalls the "Dark Ages" that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

"Every week brings fresh examples," wrote Serwer. For instance, Trump "is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression."

One of the most prominent of these attacks is on Harvard University, which the administration today announced will have all its remaining grants canceled, he said. That matter is currently the focus of legal action as Harvard fights back, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

This purge is already snuffing out free thought across the country, wrote Serwer: "Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical."

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The result of all this will be to "undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us," he warned. "Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power."

And the harm done to America's ability to conduct basic research to improve our lives and advance technology is hard for lay people to comprehend, he continued.

While private companies do a lot of innovation themselves, he continued, "the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble — for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot." For instance, "commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines — the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless." And even when private companies do their own research, it takes a back seat to profit — after all, "Exxon Mobil knew climate change was real decades ago, and nevertheless used its influence to raise doubt about findings it knew were accurate."

As the Trump administration burns down America's capabilities in the pursuit of destroying "forbidden ideas," Serwer concluded, history could be on track for a grim repeat: it "will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins."