What if Donald Trump were a real-life Manchurian candidate? This is the subject of a recent essay by Christopher R. Browning in the New York Review of Books.
The Manchurian Candidate was a gripping 1962 movie about a Russian/Chinese plan to use a sleeper agent to take control of the White House.
Browning writes: “What if our Manchurian candidate president was not, in fact, an agent of an enemy power at all but acting entirely for his own reasons? And what if his base and his party continued to support him, no matter how disastrous his presidency was proving to be? Then we would be in very big trouble indeed.”
MAGA’s war on Harvard
Since coming to power, Trump has cut billions in federal research funding to American universities, with a particular focus on Harvard. Determined to break the university for not being compliant with the MAGA agenda, Trump has threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.
But his targeting of international students poses a much more long-term threat to the global leadership the United States holds in research and innovation. Harvard, along with other Ivy League universities, has long been the top destination for the world’s brightest.
It has allowed the Americans to poach the best ideas and the most qualified people.
All that came to a grinding halt in the first month of the Trump regime, with brutal stories of students kidnapped off the street and sent to ICE detention centres.
Trump has shown a particular rage towards Harvard students, claiming they pose a national security threat. He seems determined to turn Harvard into an intellectual pariah.
Why has Trump decided to burn America’s top university to the ground?
Harvard is the ultimate insider school with alums in the highest levels of law, politics and science. If Harvard can be forced to kiss the ring, all other institutions will meekly go along. As will their influential alums.
For decades, the right-wing has railed against elites and intellectuals.
Consistent polls show that right-wing voters in the MAGA-verse believe that higher education is a threat to America.
A 2023 article in University World News noted that most professors working in red states like Florida, Texas and North Carolina cited a hostile environment where their work as educators had made them “demonized.”
Beating Harvard into the ground will certainly feed red meat to the MAGA base. Recent polls show that while 56% of Americans oppose Trump’s war on universities, 83% of his MAGA supporters love what he is doing.
With numbers like that, don’t expect Trump to back down.
Trump’s war on Harvard comes as his health czar, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is attempting to shut down world-class medical research.
RFK Jr. has launched a war on the two premier medical journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. Government-funded researchers are getting the clear message that their medical research must not offend the quacks.
He has fired the entire board of the vaccine advisory committee of the Center for Disease Control. They are the gold standard, and the world counts on their work.
And the entire board of the Fulbright Scholarship Foundation quit because of MAGA interference in the selection of scholars. These represent the best of the best in all manner of fields, from architecture to crop science to biochemistry.
Hardly bastions of left-wing radicalism. But now open to manipulation by the bogus MAGA science of influencers and flat earth conspiracists.
This fits a pattern started with the high-profile kidnapping by ICE of international student Rumeysa Ozturk — a Fulbright scholar.
The authoritarian playbook
Trump’s attack on academia mirrors Nazi Germany’s war on German universities following their seizure of power in 1933.
Before the rise of the Nazis, Germany was the global centre for academic research. It was the home of the best in science, philosophy, music and the humanities. The attack on academia wasn’t subtle. The Nazis went to these global centres of learning with fierce determination.
In the 1975 book, The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of German Universities, historian Frederic Lilge documented the dismal attempts by university directors to accommodate Hitler.
They agreed to change the curriculum. Researchers began to reshape their work to ensure it did not contradict government edicts. Thousands of educators and researchers were fired, but some of the brightest minds in the world left Germany — many heading to the United States.
The result was an intellectual catastrophe for Germany.
German research was eclipsed by the rise of universities like Harvard, Princeton and Yale, which had welcomed refugee researchers. But the American century that emerged from this massive influx of intellectual power is now over.
Even if Trump were to suspend his war on Harvard, the damage has been done. Too many stories have come out of students being kidnapped by ICE for researchers to venture into the United States.
Universities are trying to dramatically shift their programming and hiring to stay in the good graces of the tyrant in Washington. It will only drive down the intellectual credibility of the country.
Canada’s opportunity
The lights are going out on American innovation. Is Canada ready to open the borders to invite thinkers, writers and researchers?
After Trump came to power, three of the top scholars on fascism left the United States for Canada. Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley have made it clear they are leaving because of the dangerous drift of American fascism.
Are we ready to invest in post-secondary research to a degree that Canada could become a haven for intellectuals just as the United States became a haven for 1930s German thinkers?
It presents a huge opportunity, but the reality is Canada’s conservative premiers, Ford, Moe and Smith, have been seriously undermining what should be world-class education systems.
Ford has left Ontario universities and colleges hanging by an economic thread. Premier Moe seems to want to push Saskatchewan back into the black-and-white world of the 1950s, and Danielle Smith is in full MAGA mode and is targeting funding to research she considers “too liberal.”
Maple MAGA leader Pierre Poilievre has threatened to go after international students and universities that he considers “woke.” It’s his Mini-Me Trump attempt to beat up on underfunded schools to stoke the rage base.
Canada has a chance to build on the research collapse in the United States, but it will take vision and leadership, both in short supply among the premiers.
Perhaps the Prime Minister will step up.
This is our moment. Either we seize the opportunity to lead, or we can sit back and be a branch plant of the great American decline.
Charlie Angus is a Canadian author, journalist, broadcaster, musician and politician. A member of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Angus served as the federal Member of Parliament for the riding of Timmins—James Bay from 2004 to 2025. A version of this article was originally published on the Substack blog, The Resistance.
