You would expect me as an (ex-) academic – and who moreover has taught at two American universities – to be more concerned by Trump’s current attacks on higher education than on other aspects of his proto-fascist regime. The Harvard story is particularly shocking (Google it); but it’s good to see the university fighting back. (Others haven’t.)

Because for Trump everything is personal, I’ve wondered whether his failure to get into a decent university as a young man may lie at the bottom of this. (Did he try?) A more likely factor, however, is his contempt for intellectual enquiry generally, and for the over-educated snobs who try to make him feel inferior to them. He of course repeatedly insists that he’s brighter than any of them – ‘a very stable genius’, ‘no-one knows more about (whatever) than me’ – in a way that suggests that he’s not altogether secure in this belief; but attacking ‘intellectuals’ and their institutions is a way of getting his revenge against his more highly-educated critics. It also fits in with the philistinism that appears to be a common ingredient of many kinds of capitalism (see my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, chapter 6); and which devalues intellectual enquiry altogether.