BY MIKE STEVE COLLINS
The Trump administration is waging a highly successful war on knowledge and its pursuit and dissemination, disguised as a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); antisemitism; and lack of viewpoint diversity.
This war on knowledge has dealt potentially crippling blows to Harvard University and has enabled the brushing aside of parts of the Constitution in cases like that of Rümeysa Özturk, an asthmatic Tufts graduate student who, on March 25, 2025, was surrounded by masked agents, marched in handcuffs to an SUV, and flown to detention in a Louisiana prison where her health was put at risk by poor conditions and contemptuous treatment by medical staff—all without so much as the articulation of a clear charge against her. Özturk was accused by the Trump administration of being in league with the terrorist group Hamas, but this accusation was found to be utterly unsubstantiated by the judge who ordered her release from detention six weeks after her arrest: Her true offense appears to have been the coauthoring of an op-ed urging that Tufts University “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from Israel because of Israel’s infliction of massive civilian casualties in Gaza in response to Hamas’s savage terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023.
Although Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding, February 21 declaration that he planned to gut government bureaucracy did not mention education, it is clear that the Trump administration is making Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which forbids recipients of federal funds from practicing racial discrimination) and the rarely-invoked provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act used to target Özturk its chainsaws for gutting academic freedom.
Some of the larger purpose of this power-saw approach was revealed by Trump’s June 4, 2025, presidential proclamation seeking to block foreign students from attending Harvard on the grounds that the university’s enrollment of potentially dangerous scholars was so irresponsible as to pose a national security risk. National security is the common denominator of almost all of Trump’s arguably un-Constitutional actions since he returned to the White House. It has been invoked directly or indirectly not only in the Harvard case but in everything from Musk’s gleeful destruction of the United States Agency for International Development—at the cost of potentially hundreds of thousands of lives—to a crackdown on immigration that includes deporting potentially innocent people to an El Salvador superprison to deploying federal troops to Los Angeles following protests against raids there by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration has taken these actions against persons and institutions without due process—another common theme in the administration’s onslaught on sources of authority, adjudication, and knowledge outside itself.
What this all amounts to is that Trump is governing as if his election had doubled as a declaration of a national state of emergency. He is able to wield emergency powers of a scope undreamed of by previous presidents because he has nearly unconditional support from the GOP and from a wing of the media—from Fox News and streaming colossi like the Charlie Kirk Show to cowed mainstream outlets that pay to settle mostly meritless cases Trump files against them—that is so vast that it controls the majority of American public speech. All this confirms my research during the last few years into the movement that brought Trump to power: the anti–civil rights movement, as I call it in a 2024 book. My discovery was that the most important thing in a society is not truth or virtue or law or beauty but the power to define truth, virtue, law, and beauty and to decide who has the right to do the defining. In my book, I call this agenda-setting power and show that founders of the anti–civil rights movement—out of an aggrieved sense that such power had been snatched from them by the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating the integration of schools—began a campaign, still underway more than seventy years later, that built the legal, ideological, and media apparatus Trump is using to govern.
This apparatus has put old wine into new bottles. Today’s equivalent of the Brown decision (now accepted even if only as a proclamation of absolute color blindness) is “DEI”—shorthand for a set of “illegal and immoral” policies (in the language of one Trump executive order) designed to reduce persistent social inequalities. Thus, in the Harvard proclamation, Trump’s agents both demand the dismantling of DEI—citing in the process the singular scarlet letter of the affirmative action case Harvard lost in 2023—and insist upon a new kind of affirmative action and DEI: the pursuit of “viewpoint diversity” in admissions and hiring.
Such unapologetic contradictions have become familiar to those who keep losing to Trump and wondering what happened. To win, they have to realize that he is playing a different game than the game of ordinary political, legal, and academic strategy that they are used to.
Trump is playing a game that is only possible in what has been called the “state of exception.” True, he has been accused of threatening the rule of law. But in the state of exception, the rule of law matters less than the leader’s authority; only the decision of the sovereign matters, and Trump, with the aid of the Supreme Court and his Greek chorus of right-wing media outlets, has consolidated a massive amount of sovereign authority.
In his theory on the state of exception, philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls attention to a special sort of sovereign—a leader freed “from all subordination to the law” who becomes himself a “living law.” Such a leader, like Augustus in Rome, is free, through his agents, to declare what the law is—to declare, for instance, that Özturk can be incarcerated in a place dangerous to her health because she coauthored an op-ed, that life-saving research at Harvard must be defunded to preserve “national security,” or that attempts to bring the leader and his deputies back within the law constitute “judicial tyranny,” in the words of Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Trump is not yet a living law, and Özturk is no longer in prison for the time being. Harvard is suing for, in effect, its freedom and appears to have a good case. But to keep Trump or his designated successor from achieving full living-law status, his opponents must begin by acknowledging that Trump’s power is rooted not in the Constitution but in his own red-tied MAGA charisma: They must admit they are not in Kansas anymore. They are in the state of exception.
Mike Steve Collins is professor of English at Texas A&M University.
