Selective Memory and the Trump Administration
There are things that the Trump administration won’t forget and things that it won’t remember.
It won’t forget that a Boston judge threw out its lawsuit against Harvard last September. Trump has been threatening Harvard in the months since, even as “negotiations” have been going on behind closed doors. Now it is suing Harvard for antisemitism. There is at least a small sign of hope in The New York Times’ reporting that Harvard is a target in “the White House campaign to remake higher education. That is different language from what the mainstream media were using this time last year when the campaign began. I discuss some of that earlier language in chapter one of The Know-Nothing Campaign against Higher Learning.
What the Trump administration will not remember is its own deeply antisemitic affiliations, which I also discuss in my pamphlet. It won’t remember Charlottesville. It won’t remember Nick Fuentes, neo-Nazi Holocaust denier whom Trump himself hosted for dinner at the White House in 2022. Defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with Fuentes in 2025, Trump said of Fuentes: “I don’t know much about him.” Nor will it remember the death toll in Gaza, now in excess of 75,000. It especially won’t remember the children of Gaza. In early October, UNICEF’s Executive Director, Catherine Russell, summed up the devastation in that famine-ridden land:
“In the last two years, a staggering 64,000 children have reportedly been killed or maimed across the Gaza Strip, including at least 1,000 babies. We don’t know how many more have died due to preventable illnesses or are buried under the rubble. ”
Their memories have also been buried—under the ICE raids, the Venezuelan attack, the Iran War, the threats to Greenland and Cuba. The Harvard lawsuit represents another layer of amnesia.
