To be fair, President Donald Trump and his minions never promised to make America smart again.
Nor did they ever assure Americans that they would tell them the truth — or that they even cared about the truth.
Understanding that makes the otherwise inexplicable war the president and his camp followers such as Indiana Gov. Mike Braun and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita have waged against journalists, the nation’s colleges and the courts more understandable.
Trump, of course, began his rise to prominence by shrewdly manipulating journalists and presenting himself as something like a figure out of the classic American myth, the self-made man.
His image was always more air-brushed than real. Most self-made men don’t start with a $400 million inheritance from their slum-lord fathers.
And Trump’s presentation of himself as a business savant was more carefully constructed than any building he ever erected. Most independent analyses of his career and wealth suggest he’d be far richer now if he’d just invested the $400 million he received from his father in a mutual fund instead of launching himself into the real-estate career that led him to six bankruptcies.
It was when he turned from business and entertainment mythologizing to politics that journalists first began examining the obfuscations and implausibilities in Trump’s story — and his hostility emerged toward those who helped make him famous.
As has been the case so often with Trump, fate lent him a hand. When he decided to go to war with journalists — declaring them, among other things, “enemies of the people” — the collapse of the business model sustaining news coverage made news organizations more vulnerable than they’d been in two centuries.
Never a brave man himself, Trump found it easy to pick a fight with an opponent who was already grievously wounded.
That’s why he loves initiating expensive nuisance lawsuits against media companies that labor to pay last week’s light bill.
The same goes for his assaults on higher education.
Some of his grievance seems personal. There are stories out that suggest either Trump or a family member was denied admission to Harvard and Columbia, which triggered his animus against those institutions.
Student privacy laws prevent those schools from either confirming or denying the stories. This, again, creates a situation in which the president can battle an adversary hobbled in defending itself.
But some of Trump’s hostility is more than personal. His campaign to force the president of the University of Virginia — the school Thomas Jefferson founded — was designed to send a message.
This president doesn’t like colleges or universities where students are taught to ask questions and think for themselves.
Trump’s message and lesson have filtered down.
Not long after he took office as Indiana’s attorney general, Todd Rokita, engaged in a pointless battle with conservative media figure Abdul-Hakim Shabazz. Rokita did so because Shabazz reported things that didn’t make the attorney general look great.
So, aping the Trump playbook, Rokita attacked Shabazz’ status as a member of the Statehouse press corps. The silly affair ended when Rokita settled a lawsuit he would have lost.
Then he moved to attacking three of Indiana’s finest independent universities, Notre Dame, Butler and DePauw, on the grounds that the schools’ commitment to inclusive policies discriminated against — wait for it — white males.
Not to be outdone, Gov. Braun signed a bill that gave him total control over Indiana University. He used that control to appoint three new board members who occupy ideological space to the right of Genghis Khan. He then cut hundreds of programs and majors.
Braun said he did so to create viable career paths for IU students — making it sound as if the state’s flagship university should be just another vocational school.
America’s commitment to public education is Jeffersonian in conception. We taxpayers invest in schools to prepare young people to meet the responsibilities of citizenship in a self-governing society.
If our education system is only supposed to supply worker bees, then employers rather than the taxpayers should have to fund schools.
Trump and Rokita also have been bickering with a legal system that attempts to hold them accountable for their misdeeds. They have sought to undermine the courts.
Journalists, colleges and the courts have something in common.
All revere the truth and exist to pursue it.
But Trump, Rokita and Braun don’t see the truth as their friend.
That’s why they’re trying to destroy the places truth lives.