Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• The Americans working themselves into the ground• The US is becoming impossible to live in• The White House I worked for would have condemned this image. Trump refuses• Maga leaders want ‘traditional American families’ – but can’t stop having affairs• Sin City has lost its shine. It shows how far America has fallen• The Florida street that exposes America’s growing homophobia• Inside America’s most loyal Trump town – where people still think he’s ‘a good man’
Donald Trump has offered many reasons for waging war on America’s most prestigious universities: that they are hotbeds of antisemitism, that they are over-indulgent of transgender athletes, that they are conduits for Chinese espionage or, simply, “behaving very badly”.
The upshot, though, has been devastating. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the rest of the Ivy League have suffered deep cuts in federal funding for research. They can’t hold on to foreign students, who were once regarded as an invaluable asset providing diversity and prestige as well as a reliable funding source. Numbers were down about 17 per cent last year as a result of tighter visa rules and processing delays. They have also seen some of those students arrested, detained, and threatened with deportation for exercising what used to be called free speech rights.
