That Donald Trump, contrary to popular belief, is an absolutely predictable character is something we've already said here (and that someone has repeated), and the actions of the US president only corroborate it. His brutal attack on American universities, and Harvard in particular, is nothing less than a populist eruption of a vulgarity that may seem unusual to us but has ancient and deep roots. It can be described, if you will, as culture war, because it's a label that pedants like, but in reality it stems from the old resentment against the elitism that culture, knowledge, and higher education represent for some sectors of society. You don't have to go to the United States: in our country, we have a population with alarming dropout rates, and this is fertile ground for suspicion of studies, students, books, etc.
Right-wing and left-wing populisms have often portrayed university students and intellectuals as enemies of the common people, represented by the current leader. This reached a bloody climax in Pol Pot's Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge, who declared themselves communists, perpetrated, between 1975 and 1979, a genocide of two million victims, in which it was enough to wear glasses to be arrested, tortured, and executed. This is no joke. Inspired by the writings of Stalin and Mao (the Cultural Revolution), Pol Pot and his henchmen sought to establish a Maoist society, devoid of religion, dedicated to agriculture and livestock. Glasses became symbols of capitalism and university elitism, and were punishable by death, as were all those dedicated to professions related to knowledge and its transmission: teachers and professors, writers, journalists, etc. And, of course, the university community.
Anti-academic and anti-cultural resentment is widespread today among the most disadvantaged segments of Western societies, those to whom far-right leaders direct their inflammatory discourses. In Trump's case, a personal component cannot be ruled out, because he himself was a fairly mediocre college student, who attended the Jesuit Fordham University for two years and eventually earned a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. Trump must enjoy taking revenge on what he sees as the conceited students of private and public universities, and in the process, he would persist in his crusade of nationalist retreat and closure by banning the arrival of foreign students. Hatred against culture is extremely vulgar, but it has its followers, and in this sense, we must also understand the Trumpist attacks on film or music stars like Meryl Streep, Taylor Swift, or Bruce Springsteen: the more famous the artist (or the more prestigious the university being attacked), the more impact his attacks garner.
