Back in days long past, in a place called Camelot, John F. Kennedy ruled as president. Kennedy was noted for wanting to have bright people around him, people who could challenge him. Today that place is more prosaically called Washington, D.C. and is ruled by Donald J. Trump. This president dislikes very much being challenged. An alarmingly ignorant man himself, he does not like bright people about him. He prefers toadies, even if they are incompetent or not particularly bright, which they mostly are.
Recently this president fired the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Dr. Erika McEntarfer, a distinguished long-time public servant, had the audacity to report a major slump in job growth since Trump began playing with tariffs.
Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, fired two top intelligence officials who reported, contrary to Trump’s assertions, that the Tren de Aragua street gang was not being run by the Venezuelan government. The list of messengers shot grows steadily.
Jen Easterly, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the Military Academy at West Point revoked. The dismissal of Easterly, herself a West Point graduate, Rhodes scholar and veteran of Afghanistan, was apparently prompted by far-right conspiracy theorist Linda Loomer who advised the president that the distinguished Easterly was anti-Trump.
Loomers’s advice has been instrumental in the firing of a host of officials including members of the U.S. National Security Council, senior director for intelligence Brian Walsh and the director of the National Security Agency General Timothy D. Haugh and his deputy. A Loomer purge you might say, sweeping out some of the brightest and best.
And then there’s the dumbing down of the military under Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has prohibited officers from attending security forums and think tank events where they have the opportunity to encounter retired generals and admirals, former ambassadors, undersecretaries of defence, retired spies and people with Ph.D.s who know foreign languages or operations research. As The Atlantic magazine commented, Hegseth’s “military-education reforms seem designed to ensure fighting men can’t think and thinking men can’t fight.”
Even words are being discarded, scrubbed from government websites and documents. Various agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, words involving diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change, vaccines, and a host of other topics. Hard to believe but the president of the United States is policing language like some run-of-the-mill despot.
America is choosing ignorance. The government will function based not on the truth but on what information pleases the president, lacking the accurate data it needs to develop sound policy for the economy, the environment and other issues. And the American people will be left in the dark. The country will operate blind.
Of particular danger is a dumbed-down military. A broadly-educated officer corp is essential in a democracy in order to guarantee the military never forgets that it serves the people and the constitution, not the government and not the president even if he is commander-in-chief.
A military narrowly focussed on the use of force is the military of a dictator. Given Trump’s temptation to use the country’s military against the American people, perhaps there is method in his madness.