Last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order that is unprecedented for a president of a liberal democracy: the dismantling of his country's Department of Education. As Antònia Crespí Ferrer explains in this newspaper (already followed his chronicles?), neither the president nor the government has the authority to order this dismantling. Even less so does the DOGE, the phantom Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump has digitally placed at the head of the Tesla and X magnate, Elon Musk, who neither ran for office (although he campaigned, intensely) nor, in principle, has any notion of the intricacies of American public administration. However, Trump has tasked Musk with reducing public spending, and Musk is carrying out the task with cuts that are both savage and arbitrary and capricious: a few weeks ago we saw him happily wield the chainsaw of the object Milei, an Argentine president who is not trying to treat himself.
Musk and Trump are also prone to insults against those they don't like, and beyond insults, to harassment and institutional violence. On the same day the order against the Department of Education (which has already sent 1,300 officials to the streets) was published, Musk posted a tweet on his social network, X, with a photo montage showing a grave with the inscription "Department of Education" on the tombstone, with a crouching Trump smiling and making the victory sign with his fingers. Trump is convinced that the world of knowledge is one of his main enemies, and he is determined to persecute it viciously. In addition to the frontal attack on the government department, funding for the Gaza genocide has been suspended, and foreign postdoctoral students, with residence permits, have been arrested for having participated in demonstrations and protests for the same reason.
On the other hand, hatred of intellectuals is characteristic of nationalisms and autocracies. As the poet Lluís Calvo also said in a tweet, let us be vigilant that here (where suspicion of culture has a long and sad tradition, both in Spain and in Catalonia, as in the Balearic Islands) we do not also be affected by this Trumpist virus, as others have already been affected: hatred of what they call wokism, hatred of immigrants, contempt for science and the urgency of climate change, border closures, patriotic withdrawal, natalism and anti-feminism: a host of illiberal toxic burdens that spread with extreme ease throughout infas Europe.
