Liner Note 16: Trumpian Fear of Knowledge

Seoul National University on Feb14, 2025

It’s increasingly clear that knowledge destruction is not a side effect of Trump’s regime but its central mission. 

A four-year presidential campaign based on lies, disinformation, and abusive accusations was the means. The elimination of knowledge—because it competes with power--is the end. 

This project has a number of branches.  One is to make corruption great again. This involves the suspending or dismantling of business law.  The law, for all its problems, encodes a long history of social knowledge that its practice always considers.  That’s why Trump lost a civil suit to E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse. That’s why U.S. corporations have lost cases for bribery of officials of foreign governments under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  The law knows and uses understandings of sexual abuse and of bribery that emerge from culture over generations and are then applied through dynamic legal processes.  This knowledge places real constraints on executive power. Trump’s war on the law is a war on legal knowledge. 

The nuclear war on DEI is another.  This has exploded from criticizing specific course requirements and administrative policies to seeking the erasure of the words, the practices, the offices, and the people involved with any whiff of it. It has become one of the most repressive political crusades in modern US history. It engages in censorship and erasure as a proxy for thought control.  

It goes beyond McCarthyism in the 1950s, which created a climate of fear by rooting out some finite number of Communists in the US government, to creating a climate of fear by defining the entire government workforce as the woke enemy. Woke is “gender ideology,” trans rights, civil rights, all the raced, gendered, sexual things not plainly supporting white patriarchal order.  Woke is the commonplace “belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”  The project is self-evidently ridiculous, understood literally as replacing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Uniformity, Hierarchy, and Exclusion. It is that, but also extremely damaging, since it aims at the destruction of the knowledge that underlies the banal procedures manged by DEI offices and personnel—knowledge from feminist studies, the sociology of race, biology and cognitive psychology and many many other fields and movements whose discoveries imposes constraints on the will to power. 

I have three points about this. It’s a total war on knowledge. The point is to eliminate interpretation, discussion, dispute, litigation, and debate, and to create reality with assertion as an act of power.  This was also the Bush II strategy, but Bannon, Trump et al. have brought it to a new stage of universal application.  

Trump doesn’t (and can’t) debate. He goes for the knock-out one liner, which is why his assertions are so often absurd. Saying “the U.S. will own” Gaza annihilates discussion of all the central issues about self-governance and right of return, which is the point; infuriating delusion is a feature not a bug: the only response is total rejection of the premise, which also stalls debate and Trump gets his way again.

You’ll remember all the decades in which we had to rebut right-wing arguments that professors were brainwashing students into political correctness by teaching Toni Morrison novels in humanities survey courses, down to the argument that the purpose of critical race theory was to make white students ashamed of their identities. 

The new Trump regime doesn’t argue. It eliminates the knowledge people who would do the arguing.  The purpose of Elon Musk’s DOGE is not to study the information systems and admin structures of the federal government to make them, say, 15% cheaper.  The purpose is to fire people who know things—the empiricists with data—so they can no longer participate, complicate, expose, or propose alternatives.  The purpose is not to fire some of them but all of them. Hence the lack of numerical goals – “we’ll reduce costs 18%, or the workforce 12% or 31% through the introduction of AI,” whatever.  Efficiency isn’t the point; destruction is. 

Second, the purpose is to harm people. Certainly they want to hurt poor people and people of color in order to silence them or to drive them off. It’s also very much to harm the government’s knowledge people. Trumpers explicitly seek to traumatize them.  The idea is to make them quit, take them out of the action, thus paralyzing the knowledge function and makes it go away.  

Ditto the attacks on the infrastructure of academic research at NIH and  (here, and at Inside Higher Ed)—starve the beast, hurt the scientists. The new head of Health and Human Services to which NIH reports, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is widely described as anti-vaccine.  But more deeply he is anti-knowledge—ignorant of and hostile to the collaborative system of millions of professional researchers who study, test, debate, circulate, challenge, and revise knowledge. All of this is to be overruled by his own impressions.  

Same goes for the destruction of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, which includes the National Center for Education Statistics.   “It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades,” one scholar said. That’s the idea.  Strip knowledge people of their knowledge and you control them absolutely. No data, no backtalk.   It’s the end of knowledge’s intrinsic constraint on power—and all that attitude. 

Musk sets the pace: he manages his conflicts of interest by eliminating the people who have knowledge of them. Again, this is not only to eliminate the rules that use the knowledge, but to eliminate the knowledge itself, at its root, by harming or purging the people that have the knowledge. 

My third point is that Trumpism is a total war on culture. Culture is the source of all the offending knowledges. It is the place where the multitudes abound and clash. It generates radically multifarious knowledges by its very existence, and also diverse methods of adjudicating these.  Some of the most settled of these wind up as law, but most remain in solution in the society, to use Raymond Williams’ metaphor. They are embodied in structures of feeling, where identity, experience, and more abstract political questions and economic questions exist indissociably together. They interact with each other sometimes in political movements and debates, and routinely in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts—poetry, commercial filmmaking, music, criticism, everything. 

Trumpism hates culture, starting with its innate diversity—culture is always a relation among plural cultures, as Fredric Jameson among many others have insisted across the decades. Trumpism also hates culture for its complexity and its power. It is too multitudinous and also simply intelligent to be assimilated or destroyed. It is rooted in millions of concrete experiences that cannot and will never be dispatched with the great man’s abusive assertion or his claim to ownership. One example is the unfathomable courage of Palestinians living in the ruins of their deliberately destroyed cities, homes, schools, universities, shops, and hospitals. Among other things, that is will as culture, in all its power.

The dumb stuff Trump does, like firing the board of the Kennedy Center in D.C. and replacing it with one that then appointed him chairman, shows the anxiety that lies behind his contempt for culture outside of television.  Apparently the Kennedy Center once had a drag show.  One can imagine Trump’s lifetime of offhand comments about culture, history, and feelings, that never fail to displease the listener. Same with Musk, a terrible bungler outside his core expertise of capitalizing tech monopolies. Culture delivers these men that little jolt of humiliation.  It’s their zone of confusion and weakness. Hence their attempts to establish the one knowledge to rule all others—the “deal” for Trump, some physics of social Darwinism for Musk. But it never works outside its own self-defined terrain.

The hatred behind all this will cause widespread suffering and death.  The default is move fast and kill folks.  Destroy their workplaces, labs, clinics, food distribution networks, institutes.  Fire everyone, burn everything.  If you don’t like it, try and sue me.    

Because of the abuse and the violence and the hostility baked into every statement and announcement and goal, it’s easy for us to see this engine of knowledge destruction as tremendously powerful.  It’s point is to make us too afraid to fight. It’s easy to take the bait. 

It’s made easier still by the total capitulation of the country’s corporate and tech elite to Trump’s lifelong practice of extortion through abuse of counterparty.  We were right to be alarmed when billionaire overlords Bezos and Soon-Shiong blocked Kamala Harris endorsements at the Washington Post and LA Times papers that they own: if these supremely powerful people are afraid of Trump, and appeal to him by stepping on their knowledge professionals, then shouldn’t I be too?

The right answer is no.  Trump’s hatred flows from anxiety, shame, and fear in the face of the general culture. It has often detested him but more importantly is indifferent to him and will proceed in its infinite variety and unpredictable directions on its winding course.  Trump’s sociopathology expresses his experience of his own weakness, which no success has ever overcome. He focuses on exterminating internal enemies because absolutely everyone is a threat. 

We should see ourselves that way, as what we actually are—a mortal threat to Trumpism.  We should side with the culture, because it is going to win.