U.S. President Donald Trump salutes at the annual National Memorial Day Observance in the Memorial Amphitheater, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., May 26, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
Why is Trump trying to cancel “Sesame Street,” which has helped children learn to read and count for over half a century?
Why is he seeking to destroy Harvard University?
Why is he trying to deter the world’s most brilliant scientists from coming to the United States?
Because he is trying to destroy American education — and with it, the American mind.
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated public. Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music. Stalin and Pinochet censored the media.
And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not just what we do, but also how and what we think.
He has embraced one of the mottos from George Orwell’s 1984: “Ignorance is strength.” He knows that an uninformed public is easier to divide and conquer.
There are five facets to Trump’s authoritarian attack on the American mind:
The protagonist of 1984 works in the so-called Ministry of Truth, where he’s made to literally rewrite history because Big Brother knows that he “who controls the past controls the future.”
That’s chilling in a dystopian novel. It’s far scarier in real life, where Trump and his MAGA cronies are making schools whitewash slavery and segregation, cover up the genocide of Native Americans, and erase the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
Authoritarians know that if they can convince us our country has never been wrong, they can make us believe our ruler is always right.
If they can make us forget how brave activists fought for change in the past, they can stop us from seeking change in the future.
Trump wants us to forget (or never know) that he lost the 2020 election and then instigated a coup against the United States.
He even claimed last weekend that former President Joseph R. Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone.
As Trump tries to abolish the Department of Education, he’s also proposing to cut funding for K-12 public schools and to force universities to let him influence student admissions, faculty hiring, and what is taught.
As a professor, I know firsthand how education empowers young people’s minds. We can’t have a functioning democracy if people cannot deliberate critically about it. That’s why authoritarians replace education with indoctrination.
But the Trump regime doesn’t want a functioning democracy.
Instead of teaching students to think for themselves, authoritarians seek to instill blind allegiance and suppress dissent. As Trump adviser Stephen Miller said: “Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots.”
This is why the Italian and German fascists of the 20th century immediately turned their countries’ educational systems into instruments of the party.
By freezing university research grants and attacking the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and USAID, Trump is stifling medical and scientific research.
And his cuts to the Centers For Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration put all of us at risk.
He’s also abducting and deporting international scientists who disagree with his administration. Can you imagine a crueler way to rob America of the global intellectual capital that has helped us become the world leader in scientific research?
He is now revoking visas of some Chinese college students. Some 277,000 students from China attended school in the United States last year, second only to the number of students from India. The United States employs tremendous numbers of scientific and technological experts originally from China. We need this continued pipeline of intellect and skill.
How can medical research and disease prevention be political? How can scientific research in general become political? Why is Trump afraid of science?
Because science acknowledges objective facts. Authoritarians insist that the ruler is more powerful than the facts. Trump wants to control the facts.
As George Orwell wrote, “it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”
From suing ABC and CBS over their news coverage to threatening to strip network broadcast licenses to defunding PBS and NPR, Trump is trying to silence America’s sources of news.
As Trump repeatedly says: “I call it the fake news media.”
He wants control over what information Americans can (or cannot) get.
His regime is even going through social media accounts of people seeking visas to the United States.
A free press exists to question authority and help the public question it as well. But authoritarians insist that they must never be questioned.
Authoritarians want to consolidate state power over what the public can know.
The arts exist to provoke us, challenge our thinking, and help us see beyond ourselves.
They arts are an important and independent aspect of an educated society, which is why authoritarians have historically attacked them.
So it’s no surprise that Trump is canceling grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, is dictating what’s displayed at the Smithsonian, and has installed himself as the chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
To limit art is to limit free speech and expression. It’s a crucial step that authoritarians use to silence anyone who dissents through creativity.
***
Added up, these five facets of Trump’s attack on the American mind render us less informed, less inspired, and easier to control.
They empower him to divide us with hatred and fear.
And they prevent us from discovering that we have more in common with one another than with the authoritarians who try to rule us.
This attack on our minds reduces our capacity for self-government because ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
What you can do: Please share this essay, and help spread the truth.
NOW READ: A sick obsession is killing workers, democracy and our planet
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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