Killing A $44 Billion Per Year Export Industry
The Trump administration is on track to end an industry producing $44 billion in exports that accounts for 378,000 American jobs. The jobs are mostly well paid, and the making of the product is environmentally friendly. The industry is U.S. higher education for foreign students.
International students are a major economic contributor to the states of California, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, and Illinois. The full tuition those students pay subsidizes Americans’ tuition to these institutions. The jobs created are not just on campuses but extend to the surrounding communities in small businesses such as restaurants, retail stores, and real estate.
Does Trump care about the economy or is he just trying to get even with institutions that aren’t in agreement with him? Even though he himself is a graduate of the Ivy League along with his vice president and most of his cabinet, there seems a visceral hatred of teaching critical thinking in general. What else would explain the administration’s billions of dollars in cuts for basic education, basic research, and basic academic studies?
If one were to look at any rationale for this policy, it cannot be based on economic or educational improvement. Does Trump hate everyone and everything that has ever slighted him? If that is the case, he is the one who hates America…not the president of Harvard but the president of the United States.
What can be the motivation of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Peter Navaro and JD Vance, the products of the Ivy League, falling in line with such inane policies? Is power more important than principle to these people? What they are trying to do will not only cost America jobs and exported income by their elimination of foreign students, but also the next scientific discovery and new industry.
Immigrants, most of whom studied at American institutions like Harvard and Stanford, founded 70% of the AI companies in the U.S. The next industry will be incubated not in Palo Alto or Cambridge but rather in China or Canada where those nations will reap the rewards instead of the U.S. Can the Trump administration really want to denigrate one of our largest strengths in the name of revenge and fear?
We know the revenge part is baked into the Trumpist philosophy of us against them. One of the prime tenets is “a take no prisoner” philosophy of never working with anyone that is not lock step with you. The result has been the weakening of our institutions until the brink of collapse.
Politically, Harvard, University of Chicago, or Yale or even my alma mater of Fordham where Trump attended his first two years, now produce more Democrats than Republicans. That wasn’t always so. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were conservative economists at the University of Chicago.
Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet was the Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia for many years. More recently Colman Hughes, a conservative philosopher, received his degree from the university in 2020. I took a seminar with the Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard in the early 1970s while he was teaching at New York University…he was involved in founding the Cato Institute.
Modern American conservatism was not fomented in the streets but rather at universities. The current Republican party is not a conservative party. It doesn’t have conservative or libertarian principles. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are turning over in their graves. The modern-day party has substituted an overarching philosophy for power. When there is no longer an intellectual underpinning, a person such as Trump can become the party.
The Trumpian call to “Make America Great Again” can easily fit into the mold of George Orwell. There are many such quotes in “1984” that fit right into the nihilism of today’s Republicans such as “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” And “We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
Mao sent the intellectuals to the farm fields. He closed the universities, burnt the books and only allowed Mao’s quotes contained in the Little Red Book. All wisdom was contained there. The Chinese actually were training physicians with the chairman’s sayings instead of medical textbooks.
Trump and his group are more interested in graft than symbolism. The president knows to keep the money flowing he needs to control the masses. He needs to convince his followers that what he says is meaningful instead of just a bunch of gibberish.
Graft is Trump’s concern not building a new world order. He is a megalomaniac not a political philosopher. His public pronouncements are based on his mood not on any underlying principle.
For those reasons, Trumpism can never outlive the Donald Trump Show. We should be asking ourselves what will be left of America when the show closes.
