Trudy Rubin: Trump's cult of ignorance undermines policy at home and abroad

Watching a video of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members lavishly praising him a week ago reminded me of the effusive earnestness of former Soviet politburo members toward their communist party chairman.

Our government appears to be in the grip of a similar Cult of Personality, in which everyone must extol the Great Leader — and none dares criticize any decision, no matter how dumb.

You might also say the White House is enmeshed in a Cult of Ignorance. This particular round of Cabinet praise was for another of Trump’s ill-informed tariff moves, which are tanking a healthy U.S. economy and driving it towards a recession.

The same level of presidential ignorance has propelled a global trade war. And it lies behind Trump’s attacks on America’s most valuable resources at home — including higher education, scientific research, and security institutions. It is also making America more vulnerable to enemy attack.

What’s so terrifying is that the Great Leader rejects any advice from the knowledgeable, even though he clearly doesn’t know what he is doing — about tariffs, an aggressive Russia, or winning the technological race between America and China. Those who could inform him are either fired or not welcome in his administration to begin with.

The level of self-harm being wreaked on the country by the know-nothing in the Oval Office is already so dire that I believe it will boomerang, when it begins to bite ordinary Americans so hard that even Trump supporters have to realize he is a con man. And when a few non-brain-dead GOP senators can no longer stand the damage he is inflicting on the United States.

Here are but a few of the endless examples of how Trump’s Cult of Ignorance is making America less great.

Let’s start with his efforts to destroy Harvard University and other top centers of American learning, using the transparent excuse of trying to fight antisemitism on campus.

The president’s effort to punish Harvard — after it refused his demand for a virtual government takeover of the private university — has a more far-reaching aim. So does his threat to end its tax-exempt status, and his vow to freeze $2.2 billion in research funding. Ditto for similar attacks on other centers of scientific research, including the University of Pennsylvania.

He is clearly heating up a far-right culture war designed to show his base he is destroying a bastion of “the elite” who supposedly sneer at Middle America. But what the president ignores — or might not even know — is that much of the money he wants to remove goes toward grants for cutting-edge research that makes America’s leading universities the most respected in the world.

So, as Harvard president Alan Garber pointed out in a letter to the university community, Trump’s attack threatens “the prospect of life-changing advances — from diabetes to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering.” Harvard professors will also lose funding for work on tuberculosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), and on research on space travel — work the government had just requested be expanded.

Trump calls Harvard University “a joke.” But as Harvard medical professor David Walt told CNN: “Cancellation of funding to researchers across the U.S. … will cost lives that could potentially have been saved in the future. This is going to have devastating consequences … for years to come. The U.S. is ceding our science and technology leadership to China and to other countries.”

What does this have to do with combating antisemitism, which Harvard has already agreed with the government to tackle head-on? Nothing. Yet, the president’s refusal to connect the dots on how his war on higher education hurts our country results in hacking away at one of America’s greatest strengths.

And by the way, so do his threats to eliminate visas for foreign students. He must be ignorant of the stats that foreign-born scientists who studied here are key to American research in so-called STEM fields, meaning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

According to a 2021 study by the National Science Board, 43% of STEM workers with doctorate degrees in the United States were foreign-born, and most probably earned those doctorates in America. And 58% of the computer and math doctorates working here, who drive the development of artificial intelligence, were born outside our country.

So who is “stupid”? Our great universities and the foreign students who earn U.S. doctorates, or a president who refuses to grasp he is killing the source of the science and tech research that makes America great?

But when it comes to ignorance, Trump’s approach to tariffs gives the word new meaning. The president has obsessed about the benefits of tariffs for years, calling himself “Mr. Tariff Man.” Yet, he still fails to grasp who pays for tariffs, insisting falsely to voters during the election that if we put tariffs on China, Beijing would shell out. Moreover, a prominent economist who coauthored a paper the Trump team cited in support of its numbers wrote in the New York Times that they “got it all wrong. His tariff math is a joke.”

For the record, as Economics 101 specifies (did Trump never take an economics course when he attended Penn’s Wharton School?), tariffs are paid by the importer, and usually passed on to the consumer as price increases. Thus, Trump’s tit-for-tat tariff war on China — apparently, he never expected Beijing to retaliate — is already causing prices to rise for all the goods we import, including iPhones and other electronics. And it is killing major U.S. exports.

Trump had to wage a hasty retreat after Apple CEO Tim Cook came crying to the White House that Iphone prices would skyrocket. And Cook is only one of the people who are rushing to complain — along with farmers, small-business associations, semi-conductor manufacturers and the auto industry — since Trump’s ill-considered, erratic trade war will cause ugly economic damage across the economy as a whole.

Yet, even today, with the stock market tumbling, Trump appears blithely oblivious to the impact of tariff policies. He threatened the “termination” of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Thursday, after Powell had the audacity to say the obvious: Trump’s tariff games will lead to higher prices and a recession. Never mind that firing Powell — one of the few adults who can check the president’s economic blunders — would no doubt cause the markets to crater.

No room here to go into the foreign policy wreckage Trump’s Cult of Ignorance is already producing. His utter confidence in his own “genius” leaves him at the mercy of foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin who can easily manipulate his maniacal ego. And I still recall his October interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board in which he predicted Xi Jinping would quickly bow to his tariffs, which would prevent any attempted takeover of Taiwan. Say what?

Still, until the country wakes up, or supine Cabinet members stand up, there is no end to the Trump cult’s madness. It rests with Democrats, civil society, and sane economists and fact-based media to keep reminding the public that this president does not know what he is doing.

And that the harm he inflicts comes not from wisdom, but from an ego run wild.

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