I wonder whether there are any serious historians out there who support Donald Trump? If it rests on his relationship with the subject itself, there can’t be many. His historical gaffes are becoming legendary: talking of the Revolutionary army capturing enemy airfields in the 1770s; eliding the War of Independence with the Civil War; confused about what the Declaration of Independence says (although it’s hanging on the wall of his Oval Office); uncertain whether or not he should obey the Constitution – ‘I’ll have to consult my legal team’ (although he swore allegiance to it at his inauguration); his claim that ‘we [the USA] invented everything’ – the list goes on; plus of course his utter ignorance of the histories of other countries. All this must read embarrassingly to anyone who knows his or her history, and woundingly to those (like me) who write about it. I imagine – or hope, at least – that my old American students at the Universities of Rochester (NY) and Yale won’t be indifferent to all this. Whether it put them off voting for him, I’ll never know.

More serious than any of this is what Trump is aiming to do to institutions of higher education, like (currently) Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution: forcing them to teach only what he regards as ‘patriotic’ history, unencumbered by critical or what he calls divisive or ‘woke’ thinking; his being an old-fashioned heroic white men’s version of the American story, which will cement students’ loyalty to their flag. That’s a direct attack on the fundamental purposes of history teaching and research at this level: which are (a) to uncover ‘truths’, whether ‘patriotic’ or not; and (b) to open people’s minds to different ways of interpreting or defining those truths, wherever that may lead.

At the root of this appears to be a narrowly utilitarian view of education, and indeed of knowledge itself; which sees it not as a means of understanding, but only for how it can be used, in the pursuit of other objectives. Is it oversimplifying to connect this with the capitalist values – ‘deals’, and so on – that have defined his whole career? And which indeed represent so perfectly the stage of social and political development that the US has reached today.