The ugly truth of Trump's America first agenda

The United States became the undisputed leader of the "free world" after World War II for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important was the fact that so many of the most renowned scientists who had been displaced during the war came to America. This was especially true of German Jews and some of their comrades who were chased out of Germany when the Nazis took power. It was a massive brain drain that hobbled the German war effort and benefited the Allies greatly.

As reported in the book "Hitler's Gift" by Jean Medawar and David Pyke, Germany had long been the acknowledged world leader in the hard sciences. Between 1901 and 1933, it had won a full one-third of all the Nobel Prizes. Between 1933 and 1960, it won only eight. According to the book, “some 2600 scientists and other scholars left Germany within the first year [alone], the vast majority of them Jewish. Twenty-five per cent of all physicists were lost from German universities in an insane squandering of talent.” Almost all of them emigrated to the United States and the U.K., winning a vast number of Nobel prizes in the ensuing years. They included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Hans Bethe and Stanisław Ulam among many others.

This ended up being Hitler's gift to America which spent the next 90 years welcoming the very best minds from around the world to study here and do the research that made the U.S the world's leader in physics, medicine, chemistry and economics which has led to the astonishing innovations such as this contraption you're reading this on right now. The alliance between the federal government and the great American research universities is one of the most successful public-private partnerships in history.

The parallels between what happened to Germany's scientific community and what is happening here isn't perfect, but it's close enough. The Trump administration has embarked on a concerted effort to end America's role as a world leader in science and innovation. They aren't singling out Jewish scholars, although plenty of Jews will be caught up in it. They are instead using a blunderbuss to blast the whole system by targeting foreign students for deportation and defunding the research that will lead to the breakthroughs of the future.

There is no logical reason for any of this. Their reasons change day to day. One day it's because the research is "DEI" which simply means we have no need to understand anything about diverse populations. Another day it's withholding money for universities allegedly because of antisemitism and revoking Harvard University's right (and probably others in the future) to enroll foreign students. Now we've gone into full red scare McCarthyism toward Chinese students and scientists.

Listen to the Secretary of Homeland Security speak about it over the weekend:

That's just ignorant smearing by someone who doesn't even know what habeas corpus is. But it's a problem since our secretary of state has just announced that he will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students." There are over a quarter of a million of them studying in the country as well as other Chinese and Chinese-American researchers who are very heavily represented in the scientific fields. They are now being hunted, apparently because our government doesn't value scientific innovation and wants them to go elsewhere to share their talents and ambition.

According to the American Association of Universities:

[A] recent brief from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) found that the NIH has canceled $1.9 billion in funding across hundreds of grants over the past few months.

“This year’s terminations of biomedical research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health are unprecedented in the history of the agency,” stated AAMC in the brief.

Every day, there are stories of researchers seeing their life's work being capriciously destroyed without any thought or consideration for the value they bring to the country's economic and social well-being. Foreign scientists working in the country are harassed by ignorant customs officials and, in some cases, thrown in prison on spurious grounds. It's impossible not to see this as another example of an authoritarian government purging the country of its finest minds simply as a way of exerting control.

To make matters even worse, we seem to be also intent upon replacing our scientific community with woo-wellness influencers and conspiracy cranks, led by none other than the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr. It's a lethal one-two punch.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is eagerly anticipating that they will reap the benefits of "Trump's Gift." According to Politico, he has sparked Europe's "New Enlightenment."

European universities and top politicians have mobilized in response to Trump’s domestic measures, creating new initiatives aimed at attracting top foreign talent to Europe by offering generous grants and greater academic freedom.

Earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a €500 million plan named “Choose Europe for Science” aiming to lure foreign researchers to the EU.[...]

The Commission last month announced plans to accelerate visa procedures to attract U.S. researchers and EU research ministers met in Brussels on May 23 to discuss how to increase Europe’s competitiveness in science and innovation.

China and India are also stepping up efforts to lure foreign talent and keep their own at home.

All of this is going to affect not just the cutting-edge medical advances, but it's also going to affect U.S. business competitiveness and the jobs of the future. The dynamism of the American economy has been the envy of the world for decades, but we are throwing away the very engine that drives it. But then, the Trump administration keeps insisting that Americans yearn to work in factories and eschew material things in order to engage in more spiritual pursuits, so perhaps our future really lies with supplying the rest of the world with consumer goods while they engage in the services and investing that made America wealthy in recent years.

In some ways, it's odd that Trump would go along with all this. He's always been a big admirer of the MIT big brains like his uncle, who taught there (which he often uses as validation of his own alleged genius), and he went to Penn as did Don Jr., Ivanka and Tiffany, and it's an Ivy League school. But then he does have tremendous status envy, which was exacerbated during the pandemic when he commonly made a fool of himself with his attempts to discuss serious scientific subjects. And he certainly senses how much his followers loathe the intellectual elite.

At this point, the battle with Harvard is simply a battle of wills. He wants to see them crawl. Whether they do or not, much of the damage is already done. The top scientific talent from around the world is already seeking opportunity elsewhere and they are being offered plenty of incentives. It's only a matter of time before American talent does the same because they won't have the support or the resources to do their work here anymore.

It's a hell of a "gift" to the rest of the world. So much for America first.