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Making America Powerless Again: How Trump Is Robbing America of Its Greatest Strengths
While Trump fixates on the symbols of 19th-century power, he systematically dismantles the infrastructure of 21st-century American influence.
Mar 11, 2025
Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstands power. He is not playing chess; he is playing a reckless game of Jenga with the foundational components that actually made America great. With each ill-conceived move, he pulls out another critical block from our national structure, destabilizing the entire edifice while claiming to strengthen it. His vision for American greatness is anchored in a historically dishonest version of
the Gilded Age—a period he explicitly admires, when he believes "we were at our richest." It's no coincidence that this era represented the apex of white supremacist control following Reconstruction, when newly enfranchised Black Americans were systematically stripped of their voting rights and democratic participation.
"We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country," Trump has declared, revealing his nostalgia for an America where oligarchs accumulated vast wealth while the masses struggled in poverty, where women couldn't vote, and where Jim Crow laws ensured white supremacy remained intact.
This conception of power is devastatingly wrong and dangerous. In Trump's worldview, might is measured solely through domination: tariffs, walls, military threats, economic leverage, and the unchecked authority of the executive branch. His fantasies about seizing Panama or purchasing Greenland reveal a colonial mindset where sovereign nations exist merely as potential American acquisitions—trophies for his ego and extensions of a twisted imperial vision. This approach not only reflects a backward 19th-century understanding of power but abandons the very sources of American influence that have made us a genuine global leader for generations.
True Power Lies in Innovation and Academic Freedom
While Trump fixates on the symbols of 19th-century power, he systematically dismantles the infrastructure of 21st-century American influence. For the first time in modern history, China has edged past the United States in producing the most frequently cited scientific papers—a critical measure of research impact and intellectual leadership. Research tells us what is true, research shapes reality, and research determines which voices hold authority. The United States for decades led in research and therefore was positioned to determine truth and shape worlds. This position of power is now being deliberately eroded as Trump attacks universities, academic freedom—a necessity for innovation and discovery—and withdraws vital funding.
History demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.
The power of the United States has never stemmed primarily from military might or economic leverage; it has flowed from our leadership in knowledge creation. Researchers worldwide have looked to institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for guidance. The articles published in American journals have become foundational concepts within disciplines, allowing the U.S. to lead in virtually every intellectual field. When federal agencies generate data and analyses that become the global standard, America exercises an influence far more profound than any military operation could achieve.
When Trump attacks universities that dare to uphold academic freedom, cutting their federal funding and threatening scholars with deportation, he isn't demonstrating strength—he's surrendering intellectual authority. The recent arrest of Palestinian academic Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder detained by ICE "in support of President Trump's executive orders"—reveals how quickly academic freedom can collapse under authoritarian pressure. This is not projection of power; it is its destruction. Trump is making the United States powerless and weak.
America's Power has Come from Welcoming the Persecuted
Trump's vision of American greatness is narrowly nativist, focused on exclusion and ideas of racial purity that have ties to eugenic projects that have historically ended in atrocities like the Holocaust. Yet history demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.
When Hitler's Nazi regime drove Jewish academics and intellectuals from Europe in the 1930s, America's willingness to welcome these refugees transformed our scientific and cultural landscape. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and countless others fled persecution and found new homes in American universities and laboratories. Their contributions to the Manhattan Project and beyond revolutionized physics, mathematics, and engineering—laying the groundwork for America's technological supremacy in the latter half of the 20th century.
True power comes not from building walls and criminalizing free speech but from recognizing talent regardless of origin or wealth. Trump's methodical dismantling of immigration pathways and his demonization of foreigners don't make America stronger—they deprive us of the next generation of brilliant minds who might otherwise choose our universities, our laboratories, our companies, and our communities. Our greatest resource has never been the oligarchs who were invited to buy a "gold card" but the persecuted who found that this country welcomed them and supported their work.
The Gilded Age's True Legacy
Trump's romanticization of the Gilded Age is an admission of his true aim: the systematic dismantling of American democracy in service of white supremacy—a defining feature of those years he aims to recreate through his brutal agenda attacking diversity initiatives, public service workers, universities, and fundamental human rights.
Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 former Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to disenfranchise African Americans. Though these efforts couldn't explicitly mention race, they introduced ostensibly neutral poll taxes, property requirements, and complex literacy tests designed to prevent Black citizens from accessing the ballot box. In South Carolina, these measures reduced Black voter turnout from 96% in 1876 to just 11% in 1898. Across the South, Black turnout plummeted from 61% in 1880 to a mere 2% by 1912.
This is a legacy of the Gilded Age—a retreat from democratic principles that locked in white supremacy for nearly a century. The era Trump celebrates as America's peak was precisely when our democracy was most severely compromised.
The Choice Before Us
Trump's conception of power represents a devastating miscalculation. By fixating on the trappings of 19th-century dominance—tariffs, military posturing, white supremacy and misogyny, and oligarchic wealth—he surrenders the very sources of influence that have made America genuinely powerful: our intellectual leadership, academic freedom, diverse talent pool, democratic institutions, and moral authority.
The question isn't whether Trump makes America powerful—it's whether his understanding of power belongs in a modern world. When he severs relationships with allies, seeing cooperation as "weakness," he doesn't demonstrate strength but reveals a profound failure to understand how international influence operates in the 21st century.
True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility.
When he dismantles the Department of Education and undermines scientific research, he isn't eliminating waste—he's surrendering our most significant competitive advantage. How do we measure the loss of a great mind who might have contributed to our understanding of climate science, identified cures for devastating diseases, or developed technologies to preserve our democratic systems? The cost of his destruction is beyond measurement.
Trump is indeed making America powerless even in ways that he should be able to understand through his myopic worldview—after all, he is making America bow to the richest man on earth and embracing dictators who destroy democracy. But he is abandoning the very sources of American power that have made us exceptional: our commitment to knowledge, our embrace of talent regardless of origin, our democratic institutions, and our capacity for moral leadership. The world could once rely on the United States, that is no more.
The gilded America he envisions—where oligarchs extract immense wealth from land and labor, where white supremacy reigns unchallenged, and where democratic participation is systematically suppressed—isn't a vision of American strength. It's a return to a time when our nation's power was narrowly concentrated among the few at the expense of the many. That is no power. That is a monarchy. That is death to democracy.
True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility. By abandoning these principles, Trump isn't making America great again—he's making America powerless in the ways that truly matter.
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Jewish Americans Say GOP's Phony Charges of Antisemitism Only Empower Trump's Authoritarianism
"Distorting the meaning of antisemitism and making Jews the face of a campaign to crush free speech is deeply dangerous to Jewish Americans and all of us who work for collective liberation."
Mar 05, 2025
A video shown at the beginning of a hearing on antisemitism held by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday set the tone for the Republican Party's approach to the issue, with the GOP-led panel featuring images of student protesters against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza—but none of Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, publicly displaying a Nazi salute at an inauguration event in January.
Beth Miller, political director for Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Action, said she was "shocked" by the omission, but argued that "the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are operating under the guise of fighting antisemitism, while actually working to attack the Palestinian rights movement, universities, and civil liberties."
The hearing, said Miller, is consistent with the threat Trump issued Tuesday to student organizers who take part in protests like those that spread across the U.S. last year in support of Palestinian rights, when he said he would "jail and deport" students and pull federal funding from schools that allow what he called "illegal protests."
"The GOP does not care about Jewish safety," said Miller. "This is political theater."
One witness called by the committee Democrats was Kevin Rachlin, Washington director of the Nexus Project, which promotes government action against antisemitism. Rachlin testified that while seeing Musk display a Nazi salute at an event for the president was "beyond terrifying for American Jews," what was "most troubling" about Musk's actions was the "lack of condemnation" from Trump's own party.
Leading antisemitism expert: Seeing the Nazi salute on the most prestigious platform in the country is beyond terrifying for American Jews.
What's most troubling? Lacking condemnation when "public figures like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk advance antisemitic conspiracy theories.” pic.twitter.com/dY5BjeBXk3
— Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (🦋 now on bsky) (@JudiciaryDems) March 5, 2025
Republicans called three people to testify: Adela Cojab, a legal fellow at the National Jewish Advocacy Center; Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; and Asra Nomani, editor of the Pearl Project. All three witnesses suggested students who oppose Israel's violent policies in Palestine, not the far right, are the propelling force behind antisemitism in the U.S.—despite the fact that many Jewish students organized, participated in, and supported the campus protests that spread nationwide last year and reported that pro-Israel counter-protesters were largely responsible for making demonstrations unsafe.
Nomani warned that antisemitism "has become an industry," but the advocacy group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action suggested her words carried little credibility considering she was "talking about student protesters... not Trump, Musk, and their enablers in Congress who are actively wielding the machinery of antisemitism and making Jews in America less safe."
Cojab called for the official adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which uses examples of antisemitism including "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, i.e. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor," and "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis"—suggesting that statements by Israeli officials calling for the "cleansing" of Gaza and Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza should never be referred to as genocidal actions.
Miller noted that the IHRA's definition is "opposed by Jewish, Palestinian, and Israeli groups, as well as civil liberties organizations like the ACLU," and urged viewers to tell their senators to oppose the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify the IHRA's definition.
Barry Trachtenberg, presidential chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University and a member of JVP's academic advisory council, warned that "distorting the meaning of antisemitism and making Jews the face of a campaign to crush free speech is deeply dangerous to Jewish Americans and all of us who work for collective liberation."
JVP Action warned that although the hearing "will do nothing to promote Jewish safety, it will expand authoritarian policies to dismantle civil liberties, and enable the MAGA Right to score cheap political points."
Bend the Arc credited Ranking Member Sen. Dick Durbin for pointing to Musk's amplifying of the far-right, Nazi-aligned Alternative for Germany political party ahead of February's elections, the promotion of the antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory by Trump and others on the far right, and the president's dismantling of the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights as evidence that "Trump administration actions do NOT make Jews safer."
Meirav Solomon, a Jewish student at Tufts University and co-vice president of J Street U's New England branch, testified that "Congress and the Trump administration are abandoning the most effective tool the government has to fight antisemitism in all of its forms."
"The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) handles cases of discrimination and harassment against Jewish students, providing a crucial avenue for Jews and other minorities to advocate for our rights," said Solomon. "This administration has suspended thousands of OCR investigations and no longer allows students or their families to file complaints, and now the office's future is uncertain."
Jewish college student and advocate against antisemitism: The actions of the Trump Administration are divisive, and they erode the rights and freedoms that've allowed American Jews to flourish.
Our future depends on your commitment to protect pluralism and democracy. pic.twitter.com/SwSJ10tMic
— Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (🦋 now on bsky) (@JudiciaryDems) March 5, 2025
Solomon called on lawmakers on the committee to "be honest about the most urgent threat to the Jewish community. It is not student protesters but the bloody legacy of Pittsburgh and Poway, Charlottesville and the Capitol riot."
Ahead of the hearing, Bryn Mawr College student Ellie Baron told JVP Action that organizers must "continue working to dismantle real antisemitism while also defending our friends and community members who are falsely accused of antisemitism. The only way forward is through forging greater solidarity with all people who are targeted by fascism and supremacist ideologies, including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism."
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Trump Threatens Campus Protesters With Imprisonment
"Trump here is is referring to pro-Palestine protests so you won’t hear a peep from conservatives or even pro-Israel liberals," said one journalist.
Mar 04, 2025
In a move that one critic said was likely preemptively targeted at "protests against the long list of horrific measures" President Donald Trump plans to impose as well as Palestinian rights demonstrations, the president on Tuesday threatened students with imprisonment if they take part in "illegal protests" on campus.
Trump didn't cite any law or executive authority that would permit him to order the arrest of students who exercise their First Amendment right to participate in protests, noted Enzo Rossi of the University of Amsterdam.
"What does "'illegal' mean?" wrote Rossi. "An occupation? A sit-in? Ignoring arbitrary police commands?"
In addition to threatening students with imprisonment, the president said he would end federal funding for "any college, school, or university that allows illegal protests."
The threat came nearly a year after nationwide campus protests began over Israel's U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza, with students assembling on their campuses and setting up encampments to demand that administrators divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies profiting from Israel's apartheid policies and attacks on Palestinians.
Those protests, though protected under the U.S. Constitution, were the subject of major crackdowns by police in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and other cities, with more than 3,100 students, faculty members, and supporters arrested for demonstrating against the U.S. government's broadly unpopular support for Israel's slaughter of Palestinians.
Former U.S. President Joe Biden said last year that he supported non-violent protests but suggested student demonstrators were causing "chaos" and signaled support for the nationwide police crackdown.
An analysis last May by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that 97% of the demonstrations were non-violent—but pro-Israel academics and politicians from both sides of the aisle repeatedly condemned the protests.
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic, said that "a lot of cowards in academia will use [Trump's directive] as an excuse to crack down on campus protest," as many university officials did last year.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill pointed out right-wing policymakers' and commentators' frequent claims that they aim to defend "free speech on campus"—a rallying cry that tends to target progressive ideologies.
"If Trump or [Vice President] JD Vance or any of these hypocrites who claim to be free speech warriors actually believed in free speech, they would vociferously defend speech they hate, including pro-Palestine/anti-genocide speech," said Scahill. "But they don't. This has been the con from the start with that crowd."
Self-proclaimed "free speech absolutists" like Tesla CEO and Trump ally Elon Musk "would be going mad" if Biden had suggested protests "by conservative students or pro-life groups" were illegal, added journalist Mehdi Hasan.
Trump's statement came weeks after he signed an executive order that was purported to "combat antisemitism" by threatening international students with deportation if they join campus protests that the president characterized as consisting of "pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation."
On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the U.S. General Services Administration announced they were reviewing $51.4 million in federal contracts for Columbia University, which was a center of the student protests last year.
Students occupied school buildings last spring to demand Columbia divest from Israel. The Trump administration on Tuesday accused administrators of "ongoing inaction" against antisemitism on campus.
The agencies were acting under Trump's executive order, which also created a multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.
Author Jeff Sharlet said college professors on Tuesday should speak out against Trump's latest threat in their classrooms, and suggested the president's ultimate goal is to militarize university campuses.
"This is targeted first at international students, but it's deliberately broad enough to lay groundwork for a scene Trump and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth have fantasized: troops on campus."
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